Opinion

Microsoft misses the SOA boat (again)

Microsoft just announced the release of BizTalk Server 2006 R2 (note to Microsoft, it's nearly 2008) which apparently is the cornerstone of their SOA strategy (please insert Nelson Muntz Ha-ha! related to MS and SOA.) The availability of BizTalk

Test Center Tracker: Speedy Storage

Partnerships, confusing acronyms (or, at least, confusing usage), and high-speed disk arrays get the day started here in the InfoWorld Test Center. Entry-level Speed: If you've been looking for a reason to get into the network-attached storage g

Government by the numbers: 3, 1, 3, 4

Dear Bob …What are the tricks for applying the 3,1,3,4 ("Secretive solutions," Keep the Joint Running, 9/3/2007) to government entities? I just made the switch from private industries to county organization, and it’s been a real &ls

Apples New iPod Touch

While this is admittedly a bit off topic from Linux ultra-portables, Apple's recently released iPod Touch is an interesting device. Its by no means a general purpose portable, but it does appear to be a pretty good "special purpose" de

Research Scientist and Blackberries out to sea

Some comments from Brian McLaughlin of the University of Hawai’i School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology (SOEST) working on a cabled underwater observatory anchored just off of Waikiki Beach Mr. McLaughlin’s comments… Wha

More Data Points about SOA Productivity and Value

Download file…

Off the Record — now with swag!

InfoWorld's Off the Record blog takes a look back at its most popular posts to announce bigger payoffs and a nifty T-shirt for new submissions One of InfoWorld.com's more popular blogs is the one that's authored by you, our readers. To

Unholy alliances — get used to them

After reading through some of your comments in response to last week's post on Microsoft's apparently unholy alliance with Novell, I felt a bit as though I'd been dropped into an episode of "The Odd Couple." You know the plot

R&D sets sail for offshore

A rising tide of software development service providers have more ISVs outsourcing core components Outsourcing and offshoring are not just for IT services and business processes anymore. A small but growing niche of providers targeting R&D for ap

Managed Services Protect the Core

Things that Most People Misunderstand About SOAs

As I go from conference to conference speaking on the development of SOAs I'm always surprise to hear how much people don't understand about this concept. Perhaps it is the marketing engines around the many vendors grabbing land in this spa

SOA acronyms actually getting worse

The last thing SOA needs is another acronym, especially one named MEST, which is REST-like but doesn't offer any clear value. The only upside is when things go wrong you can say that they "MEST up". Links: REST and relaxation in SOA Do

Stupid Verizon Cellphone Tricks

Ed Foster mentions a number of frustrating problems with Verizon Wireless (VZW) in his August 20th blog entry. I have to agree with Ed and his readers about the clumsiness of and lack of coordination between VZW's sales and support organizations

Enterprise HPC news roundup: the Barcelona edition

<p>AMD finally launched Barcelona today, six months late and several hundred megahertz slower than originally expected. Still, vendors didn't wait around for things to improve; enterprise and traditional HPC vendors alike scrambled to anno

Pouring Quechup onto the fire

My last blog post (Quechup.com — online dating gone spammy) hit a nerve with the company's VP Glenn Fine, who fired off a email accusing me of 'cut and paste journalism' and threatening to call in his legal beagles. What blogger could

InfoWorld bOSSie Awards

Our parent site InfoWorld has just announced it's 36 winners for this year's Best of Open Source Awards. Selected by InfoWorld Test Center editors and reviewers, these first annual Bossies celebrate the best open source software available f

Test Center Tracker: Visiting Barcelona

AMD's quad squad: After months of anticipation and delays, AMD has finally unveiled Barcelona, its innovative quad-core processor. Just what will Barcelona mean for the enterprise? Will it be worth the wait? Over the next week (and beyond), Info

RMA Processing Fees

<P>Something that has long driven customers crazy are the arbitrary "restocking" fees that vendors often charge when you return a defective product for credit. But a reader recently encountered an unpleasant variation on that theme. I

LinuxFormat Magazine

A few weeks back at LinuxWorld I ran into some folks I know from Linux Format magazine in the UK. In my view, Linux Format is one of the best publications on open source in the known universe. It's part of the Future Media which publishes everyt

Was the iPhone price cut and the rebate part of an ingenious marketing plan?

Apple announced today that it has sold its one millionth iPhone. Pretty good. Congrats from this blogger. But, they are giving back $100 on every iPhone sold that means they are losing $100 million dollars. That has to be more than chump change even

IBM backs OpenOffice.org, capiche?

IBM threw its shoulder behind the OpenOffice.org community effort today, pledging the support of 35 of its programmers, who will contribute enhancements centering on usability, quality and accessibility. And before you ask, yes IBM has its own suite

Painless Hosted Trials

Matt has a great post on the sources of deals &amp; leads for Alfresco, which could be useful to a broader set OSS vendors. What is surprising, but not unintuitive, is the low percentage of Hosted Trials that turn into deals. Namely, Hosted Trial

First pass Barcelona test results coming next; get your explanations and disclaimers here

I've got the rough first-pass performance numbers in hand. They're quite voluminous, so I need to cut them down before I can post them. While I'm waiting for this huge file to load into my HTML editor, I'll set the stage for the

AMD’s $389 big iron

For the past year, I've been immersed in research on server microprocessor and system architectures. There have been genuine breakthroughs on so many fronts. IBM's POWER6 is built around 4.7 GHz processor cores that outpace the latest Itan

Quechup.com — online dating gone spammy

UPDATE: This item has been amended and corrected. Please see this post for the sordid details. – rxc Frequent Cringe contributor D. F. draws our attention this morning&nbsp;to the curious saga of Quechup.com, a dating/social network based in the

CollabNet 5.0 ALM offered

CollabNet on Monday is announcing availability of its CollabNet Enterprise Edition 5.0 application lifecycle management platform. The platform leverages tools such as the Eclipse IDE, software configuration management and testing platforms, which are

Serena readies mashup exchange

Serena on Monday is announcing a mashup exchange, featuring an online catalog of pre-packaged mashup applications. The Serena Mashup Exchange features mashups that can be used as is or with the company's Mashup Composer, which can modify them. T

WPF reference app offered

Infragistics plans to release Monday a reference application for using Microsoft's Windows Presentation Framework (WPF). The company is partnering with Amazon and Microsoft in this endeavor. WPF focuses on visual effects. Reference applications

Cooler weather brings hotter news

Fast chips, upcoming conferences, open source software heat up Fall

Best of open source in enterprise monitoring

GroundWork, Hyperic, Qlusters, and Zenoss put the Tivolis and OpenViews on notice

Detailed Descriptions and Decision Making

I'm reading "The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making" by Scott Plous. It's a really interesting book. Plous explains: "As the amount of detail in a scenario increases, its probability can only decrease steadily, but it

Battling Spam

I get a lot of email that matters to me: often a hundred messages a day. I get even more spam sent to me:&nbsp;thousands of&nbsp;messages a day. I manage this successfully with multiple filters, multiple servers,&nbsp;and multiple email a

Deferring technology costs

Dear Bob …"More bridge lessons" (Keep the Joint Running, 8/25/2007) included the statement, "Your job isn't to be right about all of this, then to say I-told-you-so when something goes wrong."But saying "I told you so,

Rackable Systems Creates a Virtualized Server Line

Rackable Systems, creator of high-density server and storage products for large sized datacenters, announced that they will now operate with VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) virtualization software to further their mission of datacenter consolidation. A

Whitepaper: Virtual Machine Security Guidelines

Virtualization security is always a hot topic of discussion. And now the Center for Internet Security (CIS) is joining in that discussion with its latest whitepaper titled "Virtual Machine Security Guidelines – Version 1.0". For those not f

VMware Offers Developers the VMware Infrastructure Perl Toolkit 1.0

VMware has just released a Perl Toolkit for its Virtual Infrastructure virtualization platform. Developers and administrators will be happy to know that the Toolkit can either be installed or downloaded as an appliance. The long time virtualization v

Virtugo Launches Virtualization Management Suite

Virtugo Software, a company providing software products to help manage solutions for virtualization platforms, announced the availability of virtualSuite r6, a management platform for virtualized server and desktop environments. You might remember ba

The inevitable: Wipro outsourcing software jobs to US

Remember about 4 years ago when everyone was going bonkers over outsourcing and the impact on the US economy? NPR is reporting that Indian software firm Wipro plans to open a software design center in Atlanta and expects to hire around 500 computer p

Patent reform favors high tech over biotech

While the recent battle over the Patent Reform Act of 2007 plays itself out in Congress, the really big patent news took place over at the Supreme Court this past spring and also at the Patent Office just last week. Interestingly, in general it can b

When Services Attack

Lately, I've been hearing about some nightmares when considering bad service design. They fall into three basic problem areas: First, services that are too course grained, and thus are basically cumbersome applications until themselves, not serv

Guilt-free reading

I wanted to follow up on my article from yesterday about organizations finding various ways to reduce paper waste. First, a while back, Test Center Contributor Mike Heck got his hands on Adobe Digital Editions (ADE), "a lightweight rich Internet

Podcast: Open Season on open source

Earlier this week Ashlee at The Register published the first episode of a podcast (he calls them meat casts) series that we're doing called Open Season. So far it's me, Matt Asay, and Ashlee talking a bunch of nonsense but it's moderat

Geek Week in Review

Nolo mojo. Lulu.com is suing Hulu.com for trade name infringement, alleging the new site will cause marketplace confusion. For those of you not paying close attention, Lulu is a site that lets you publish and sell your own books; Hulu is the NBC/Fox

Continuing the Web Server Security Wars: Is IIS or Apache More Secure?

The facts of web servers don't necessarily match the myths when it comes to security

Web services meet storage as a service

Startup Nirvanix takes on Amazon S3, sets up shop with storage for rent

Did we really need another iPod?

I have to say that I was pretty disappointed by the Apple announcements this past week. I was really hoping for a 12 or 13 inch MacBook Pro. As the company moves further into consumer it makes sense to that they would continue to revamp the iPod offe

Here Comes Microsoft’s Virtual Machine Management Software

Since its initial release, one of the key missing components of Microsoft's Virtual Server virtualization platform has been the lack of an enterprise class management application. Microsoft is finally correcting that problem with the release of

AMD and Intel Continue to Enhance Virtualization

When AMD and Intel first announced that they were going to add virtualization instruction sets into their respective processors, people stood up and took notice. It not only made virtualization operate more efficiently with less overhead, but it also

Rebates Go in Dumpster

<P>Victims of deadbeat rebates have long suspected that their rebates just get tossed when vendors don't feel like paying off. But now there's proof, as one small tech vendor, <A href="http://www.vastechinc.com/">Vas

Silverlight Talk in Second Life

OK, I've hit my buzzword quota for the day. Seriously, Brad Abrams&nbsp;gave a talk about Silverlight&nbsp;in Second Life&nbsp;at the end of last month.&nbsp;As it happens, I missed it: it was at 3 PM SLT/PDT, which is 6 PM EDT f