Opinion

A View from the Pragmatic

Is surveillance software part of a greater conspiracy?

As much as I usually doubt conspiracy theories, some announcements lead me to pause and wonder. What I'm wondering now is perhaps the entire invention of the Internet, the World Wide Web, email, IM and everything else we now use in our daily liv

Test Center Tracker: Porn sites aren’t the only Internet danger zones

Malicious Web: Not just porn sites: The New Zealand Honeynet Project finds porn-related Web servers tend to serve up the most malicious code, there's plenty of other site types of sites out there that are just as nearly as dangerous. That's

(Sort of) Open Source (Half) Marathon

Ok, this is definitely off topic, but… There's a podcast I listen to regularly called Phedipidations. If that name rings a bell, maybe it's because you're a runner. If not, maybe you want to skip the rest of this posting. At any rate

Don’t Be Such a Pecker!

An interesting debate sprung up the other day. I was called over to a developer's desk to help with an issue and as he sat there typing different solutions, I found myself getting more and more antsy. The problem was he can't type. He pecks

Geek Week in Review

Genuinely disadvantaged. Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage servers went titsup last weekend, giving thousands of legitimate Vista users the bum's rush. And is anybody really surprised? Vista users who were incorrectly flagged as scurvy

Enterprise HPC news: the performance edition

<p>Today's enterprise HPC news roundup is all about performance.</p> <p>New chips that will get you there (Intel's Penryn and IBM's new cell processor blades), software that will help you make your chips hum (AMD&#

A CIO who isn’t compatible with the central office

Dear Bob …I'm not really looking for advice. Or maybe I am, if you have any.My management style, if you will, was considered completely unacceptable by our Corporate Office. I have since been in a "lengthy transition" so that they ca

Malicious Web: Not just porn sites

Seven surprises from Honeypot project show any content can sting, and patching is your best defense

Baby steps for open source storage

Further contributions are necessary for the Aperi project to truly come of age

Apache Guru Greg Stein Mugged

I picked this story up from Kevin Burton's feedblog. It turns out that last week, Greg Stein, director of the Apache Foundation was mugged outside his home in Mountain View. Greg was already on crutches at the time so this is a double whammy. Ke

Power-efficiency test reveals respective strengths of AMD and Intel

In its latest round of power-efficiency tests pitting the AMD Opteron against the Intel Xeon, independent consulting firm Neal Nelson and Associates found that AMD's offering outperformed Intel's in 36 of 57 cases. Factors such as memory si

Ubuntu sponsor seeks feedback

User input is being sought on a planned 2008 release of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, according to an official at the project's sponsor company. In his blog, Jono Bacon, Ubuntu community manager for sponsor Canonical, said Ubuntu 8.04, also kno

Interesting Graph from Port25

Bryan Kirschner over at Port25 has a very interesting graph: What does the graph show? According to Bryan: "It’s showing Microsoft’s reported fiscal year revenue, which grew to $51.122B USD in 2007 from $6.075B in 1995 …. During mo

Defining OSS Community Roles – Why the Fuss?

Sun's Simon Phipps posted about the different roles/stakeholders in an OSS community. Phipps states: "I'll be using this model in the coming months within Sun to advise our engineering, marketing and management teams on their community

SSE5: Should You Care?

It says here&nbsp;that AMD has released the the SSE5 specification. These instructions will appear in future x86 processors based on AMD's 64-bit Bulldozer core. Here's the AMD overview: With the introduction of SSE5, many new 128-bit i

Test Center Tracker: Mobile drive encryption goes native

Drives you can afford to lose: The runaway leading cause of slips listed in the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse's sobering chronology of data breaches is the lost or stolen laptop. New mobile drives from Hitachi and Seagate — quipped with hardware

A Deeper Look Into the Citrix/XenSource Acquisition

Taking another quick look into the Citrix acquisition of XenSource, InformationWeek interviewed XenSource and Citrix representatives in a Q&A session – asking about how the acquisition affects the Citrix product lineup. Barron's also posted

Vista SP1: You oughta know beta

“At Microsoft, quality is job SP1.” Cringester and book author John Hedtke came up with that little gem, as pithy as any real Microsoft slogan and far more accurate. We may finally have a chance to test it out, now that Microsoft has rele

Supply and Demand Among DBAs

One of the frequent requests we've heard from MySQL customers in the last year is the need for more certified DBAs. That's one of the reasons we kicked off some seminars earlier this month to help train Oracle DBAs in MySQL. According to th

Green gadget guide for geeks

Bamboo hardware, eco-friendly chargers, and power-measuring devices are ideal tools for the tree-hugging techie

Change coming? Say it loud

The best thing you can do to increase user satisfaction is to make absolutely sure everyone gets the message when changes are made

WGA Server Outage Says Little About SaaS

We've all read about the Windows Genuine Advantage server outage. Dvorak used the event to raise concerns about SaaS. "All this proves is that these Web-based applications cannot be trusted." I am by far the biggest supporter of SaaS,

LeftHand Networks Gets Certified for Virtual Iron

Virtual Iron announced that it has certified LeftHand Networks' open iSCSI storage area network software. Virtual Iron said combining the two products delivers enterprise-class server and storage virtualization capabilities to the mainstream mar

Microsoft Project Replacement?

Many years ago, I wrote a very simple project management system that did PERT and Gantt charts on Windows 3.1. It was mostly an exercise for me to learn object-oriented programming on Windows, so I just did the basics, nothing fancy. I've notice

What Intel’s CSI might look like, the 411 on Woven Systems, a 9200 core Windows CCS system, and more

<p>In today's enterprise HPC roundup analyst David Kanter trolls through patents and interviews engineers to sketch out what Intel's CSI might look like when announced next month, the 411 on 10GbE switch vendor Woven Systems, a 9200 c

Concerned about automating programmer jobs?

I just had to comment.In a recent Ask the Headhunter ("I, Programmer," 8/23/2007), my friend Nick Corcodilos worries about Gordon Morrison's "new" approach to software development: Use more automation to write code. In other

Facebook faces the music

Bad news, Facebook fans. It turns out the Internet is full of spammers, scammers, and naughty naughty men. Who knew? Three months after opening its APIs to the world and inviting developers to build applications for the surging social network, Facebo

Test Center Tracker: The zen of Web apps and Mac OS X

Have you been thinking to get yourself a Mac for a long time and never did? Then don't miss this week Enterprise Windows where Oliver Rist asks (with his well known subtlety): "Does Mac OS X suck?". Oliver's column is the closest

Never send an HTML hacker to do a developer’s job

Web 2.0/AJAX complicates, not simplifies, substantial application development and porting projects There are few things more frustrating than filling out the last page of a four-page form on what purports to be a Web application, pressing Submit (or,

Does Mac OS X suck?

Apple's desktop platform has impressive technical chops, but it falls short from a business perspective

Managing Music Files

Over the years, I have dealt with about a dozen music playing and CD-ripping programs for Windows. When portable music (MP3 and otherwise)&nbsp;players became prevalent, most of the music management software worked on the paradigm that the compu

FastScale Offers Its Take on Managing Virtualization

A few months ago, FastScale Technology decided it was a good time to surface out of stealth mode. And with the virtualization community still beaming from ear to ear over the VMware IPO and XenSource acquisition, now seems like a GREAT time for any c

The Chrome Thin Client – Pano Logic’s Virtual Desktop

A silicon valley startup, Pano Logic, has announced their new technology which enables them to offer a virtual desktop PC that doesn't require any software or hardware components like a typical PC. The company was founded by Nick Gault who was

Microsoft tech recruiter says hiring for Vancouver Development Center has worn her out

In what I find to be a very unusual, maybe insensitive is a better word for it, blog post for Technical Careers @ Microsoft, Jenna Adorno writes that after receiving waves of questions on the Vancouver Development Center just opened by Microsoft, she

Does the FSF have teeth vs. Microsoft?

Reading Matt's blog today, I found this press release (via Groklaw) from the FSF. The title says it all: "Microsoft cannot declare itself exempt from the requirements of GPLv3" We discussed this a little bit on a previous post. I was c

The last mobile frontier: Wireless electricity

Is WiTricity, wireless electricity, the next big thing? An article in Science News last month describes the work of physicist Marin Sokjacic who demonstrated just that. The way he did it was to create two antennas that were inefficient in the transmi

What’s needed to be effective

Dear Bob …From your most recent column ("More bridge lessons," Keep the Joint Running, 8/25/2007): &lt;snip&gt;Here's why it's relevant. Your job isn't to be right about all of this, then to say I-told-you-so when s

Acer buys the farm (with cows)

For years Gateway Inc. has been standing by the side of the freeway with a sign around its neck saying “Will work (or be acquired) for food,” but nobody was willing to slow down long enough for it to jump into the back of the truck. But T

Test Center Tracker: Safe Surfing

Everyone wants to be secure while using the Internet, but tucking your enterprise into the warm, comfy blanket of safe surfing can be, at best, a significant challenge. James Borck looked at the Clearswift MIMEsweeper Web Appliance ENW10 and says tha

SOA ROI Survey Analysis

Download file…

D’oh! Donuts may get you fired

Management didn't like desktop shortcuts or donuts and I liked both. It was a recipe for trouble. I worked the help desk under a contracting company for the FDIC when they transitioned from Windows 95 to new Dell desktops running Windows XP. Man

Technology and the Bill of Rights

Do 18th century concepts of personal freedom still work in the 21st century? For some reason, I don't expect the chairman of AT&T to stand up and say, "Give me liberty or give me death." It is just not going to happen. Therefore I&

Linux, Windows duke it out over energy efficiency

The battles for energy efficiency aren't just being fought by chipmakers, server and PC vendors, and other hardware companies out there. There's a similar battle heating up on the OS layer between Microsoft and Linux.

Is that a real poncho or a Sears poncho?

Microsoft Expresses Views on Virtualization and Intel Gets Its vPro On

Microsoft's Larry Orecklin makes his opinions known about virtualization, the market and how Microsoft's approach compares to its competitors. And Intel is moving on with its latest generation of its vPro chipsets for business computers.&am

IBM: “ESB-oriented architecture: The wrong approach to adopting SOA”

I found this little goodie today from IBM, I had to read it twice. "An increasingly common request from clients is to complete a project that does not use service-oriented architecture (SOA) as a whole, but instead implements only an enterprise

To WGA Hell (and Back)!

As a veteran Windows developer I'd say I'm more or less confident of my ability to extricate myself from even the most complex failure scenarios. Flaky hard disk? Been there. Corrupted Driver Database? No sweat. In fact, after nearly 20 yea

Test Center Tracker: Savoring MS InfoPath and Forms 2007

Another helping of MS servers: Contributors Oliver Rist and Brian Chee continue dishing up their meaty assessments of Microsoft's newest crop of servers. (So far, they've looked at SharePoint 2007 and Groove 2007.) This week, they bite into

Get your JAVA, ProCurve doing well, Feds ask for comment on networking plan, and more

<p>In this today's enterprise HPC roundup Sun's new ticker symbol goes live, HP reports that its ProCurve gear is doing well, the government wants your help getting its networking plan right, and more.</p>