Opinion

New SPEC MPI benchmark, Gordon Moore at IDF, and the Windows CCS vs. Linux discussion

<p>In today's enterprise HPC news summary Intel announces that Gordon Moore will appear at IDF this fall, SPEC announces a new MPI application benchmark, there's time lapse video of the first customer install of Sun's Blackbox, a

Tubular debates

Tonight we will see the future of democracy, and it will look a lot like badly lit cat videos. Starting at around 7 pm eastern, eight Democratic candidates for president will be answering questions posed by the citizens of these United States via You

Getting technology done: managing contractors and outside support

<p>When you're dealing with teams of contractors and in-house staff the sure way to success is to value everyone for the strength of their contribution, not for who signs their paycheck.</p>

Meeting Face-to-face

Virtualizing the desktop

Power and maintenance costs of desktop computing have become an unbearable albatross for IT. Desktop virtualization provides a large-scale solution

Thin clients: The time is now

Virtualization technology could push that old desktop PC right off your desk

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Like many of you, I spent a good chunk of my weekend reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I didn't go crazy with it, although I did finish and enjoy it. I skipped the midnight book buying parties myself. My wife was obliged to take our

Backstabbed in the background check?

Dear Bob …This is a followup to a question I asked you last year ("Dealing with a backstabber," Advice Line, 2/28/2006).Finally, in February of this year, I was asked to leave. The cause was no performance improvement. The separation code

Linux Kernel 2.6.23 Gains Two New Virtualization Solutions

It was back in December of last year that I talked about the virtualization solution called Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) being added into Linux kernel 2.6.20. The Linux 2.6.21 kernel then improved on the support for paravirtualization with the

VMLogix Announces New Version of LabManager – 3.0

I can't believe it was only a month ago that we were talking about VMLogix LabManager 2.8, the company's product that is designed to help streamline the software development lifecycle. Recently, the company announced that it has once again

VMware Updates VirtualCenter Management Server with 2.0.2 Release

VMware VirtualCenter 2.0.2 is a maintenance release that includes several high-priority resolved issues from earlier patch releases, as well as several enhancements and improvements. VMware states that this maintenance release includes changes to Vir

Study: AMD more power-efficient than Intel

AMD Opteron servers proved more energy-efficient than those running Intel Xeon in server-power-efficiency test performed by Neal Nelson and Associates.

Windows Error Haikus

Got these off of Dave Farber's Interesting People list. Sent in by Shannon McElyea (thank you), these aren't new, but they're too funny not to share. Supposedly, these haiku poems have replaced the usual error messages on some Japanes

SMB Tech News Today; 7/20

* SMB backup dilemma. Some grains of salt on the never-ending array of ddomsday SMB backup stats from our resident storage guru, Mario Apicella. (Source: InfoWorld) * Xandros acquires Scalix. I was supposed to review the latest version of Xandros&#03

Can EA and SOA Get Along?

That was the question asked during this week's Webinar that I did with EA Directions and my firm. You can find the presentation and audio here. So, what did we learn? First, Enterprise Architecture (EA) is still a valid discipline within most of

Behind the scenes of “Pimp my data center” Part 1

Notes on the makeover and modernization of a little data center that could, if only

Geek Week in Review

Another week, more geeks. Here are a few stories that may have slipped under your radar. Playing chicken with search. Good news for Microsoft: After months in the doldrums, its Live Search service actually gained a couple of percentage points on Yaho

Virtualization Executive Movements This Summer

It looks like the Summer months are offering plenty of executive changes throughout the virtualization industry. In June and July, we've seen plenty of virtualization companies adding, changing, and adapting their executive team to try and reach

The SMB backup dilemma

Choice is king, but with SMB data protection solutions proliferating, confusion might just reign supreme

Identity theft? What identity theft?

GAO report concludes that theft of personal information isn’t a problem, but notifying consumers Is

OpenMosix Project Nearing End of Life

According to an announcement posted on SourceForge, Moshe Bar (the openMosix founder and project leader) plans to end the openMosix project effective March 1, 2008. For those of you not familiar with the project, openMosix is a free cluster managemen

When Software Won’t Talk

SMB Tech News Today; 7/19

Is it a coincidence that 'summer malaise' and 'too much mayonnaise' kinda rhyme? * Google opens fee-based SMB custom search. Purty cool from the Googlers. Sign up for their new Custom Search Business Edition and you can build a cu

Is Vista an orphan?

And now we reluctantly leave our investigative series on hot one-on-one live chat and move to more mundane matters, namely Windows Vista. I've been getting a lot of posts and email about MS's craptacular new OS, both pro and con (but mostly

Confidentially, E-Mail Disclaimers Are Just Dumb

<P><I>This message is for the sole use of the intended recipient. If you have received this message in error, you will immediately destroy it, cut out your tongue, and slash your wrists.</I></p> <P>Do e-mail confidentia

10 Corollaries of Murphy’s Law: Debugging

The debugging tool you need will not be installed on any computer that exhibits the problem. There will be no way to reproduce the problem on the developer's computer. Proxies, firewalls and NAT boxes will keep you from being able to connect to

Do I have a double standard when it comes to ridicule?

Dear Bob …In this week's Keep the Joint Running, "The value of a little failure here and there," (7/16/2007) you said this: Ridicule is fun, persuasive, and best of all demonizes the group of people called them. It's the more em

Microsoft in India

Zack asked: So perhaps a question that might be worth asking is if Windows and Office only costs $3 in China, how sustainable are it's prices in other markets? I remember reading about multinational companies consternating about selling online i

Beat the datacenter heat, cheap

Low-cost strategies to reduce cooling costs are a surefire cure for the summertime energy-bill blues

IT immigration: Thoughtful debate amid the flames

Last week's column advocating fast-track citizenship for technologists generated heat – but also more than a little light

Provision Networks and IBM Collaborate on VCS Deployments

Yesterday, Provision Networks announced that its market-leading Virtual Access Suite has been selected by IBM for inclusion in its Virtual Client Solution (VCS) ecosystem. According to a statement made by the company, the Provision Networks Virtual A

XenSource Reaches Customer Milestone

XenSource, provider of the open-source Xen virtualization project and provider of enterprise virtualization solutions, announced that they have reached a company milestone when it comes to its customer base. The company celebrated signing over 500 co

The Demise of Traditional Software – 2Q07

Some of you know that I've decided to track the demise 😉 of the traditional software market on a quarterly basis using IBM's WebSphere branded revenue as the basis. I use the WebSphere division for no other reason than it's the part

Hands-on: Adobe Digital Editions marks a new chapter for e-books

Almost 65 percent of new book titles are available in electronic form. Still, sales from e-books represent a miniscule fraction of total sales, which was $24.2 billion last year, according to the Association of American Publishers. In part, low digit

BEA readies BPM upgrade

BEA Systems plans this month to release a new version of its business process management suite, AquaLogic BPM 6.0, which has been optimized for complex process needs, the company said in an email bulletin on Wednesday. Also highlighted in the release

Building a business on Network.com, Intel’s Extreme processors, Lenovo building HPCs, and much more

<p>In today's enterprise HPC news roundup, Infosolve Technologies moves their business to Sun's Network.com, NVIDIA demos CUDA MATLAB tie-in with code you can download, laptop maker Lenovo is building HPCs, Intel's Extreme proces

IT vs phone sex: round three

Our&nbsp;ongoing, hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners investigation into the seamier side of telecommunications continues with a note from a Cringester who a) runs a successful high-tech consultancy and b) was a phone sex operator in a previous life.

Bill Burke is Angry Bill

Just a heads up that Red Hat's Bill Burke (of JBoss fame previously) is blogging here. Bill does write about techie stuff at the JBoss Matrix, but this blog seems to go beyond the bits and bytes and get into things like: Should you start an OSS

Web 2.0 needs Adobe

JavaScript and HTML aren't enough to bridge the desktop/mobile divide It's thrilling to imagine rich, responsive, attractive client applications that run identically on desktops, notebooks, and mobile devices, as well as over remote connect

Windows Mobile needs fixing, fast

If Apple makes some quick fixes to iPhone, it stands to beat Microsoft on the mobile front

Microsoft in China

A few weeks back, I posted a couple of blog entries on my recent trip to China. We have seen huge MySQL download numbers from Brazil, Russia, India, China (or "BRIC") with very significant growth in the last few years in China. I tried read

Skills for leading a non-profit

Dear Bob …Again, Bob, even though I starred your June 25th column ( A leadership list in reverse) to read sometime later, it always gets me that your topics have relevance to whatever I'm doing on the day I read them!Today, for instance, I was

Business Models

In a recent comment, Savio differs with my opinion on what customers are purchasing. I believe that companies don’t buy open-source products. Rather, I believe, they buy the support services and infrastructure that goes with those products. Sav

Am I Done with My SOA?

For those building SOAs in their organization…how do they know when to stop, or slow down? I mean, you can service enable and orchestrate the entire enterprise, perhaps your supply chains as well, but I doubt the cost of doing that is going to

iChannelDirect Direct Desktop Digital Delivery

DigiWonder's Saas (Software as a Service) is offering iChannelDirect as a novel approach to the frustration some vertical markets have getting&nbsp;delivery confirmation on time sensitive and important messages.&nbsp; iChannelDirect&trad

MKS unveils 2007 edition of ALM platform

MKS launched the 2007 edition of its application lifecycle management platform Tuesday, supporting reuse and change management of requirements. These capabilities, featured in MKS Integrity 2007, enable a project manager to pick up an individual or a

Will Oracle Buy Red Hat or BEA?

Matt asks (almost as an aside to a post on a related topic): My question: why not just buy Red Hat? Before Red Hat buys MySQL, and gives those database numbers a run for their money? Then, Larry Dingnan writes: A Credit Suisse analyst thinks BEA Syst

Tamino XML server coupled with Ruby on Rails

Software AG has developed an open source project offering interoperability between the Ruby on Rails Web development framework and the Tamino XML Server. Tamino On Rails is an open source contribution found here on SourceForge.net. With it, Tamino us

HP: Over 1B pounds recycled

Indicative of the rising interest in hardware recycling, also know as IT asset recovery, HP has announced that its achieved its goal of recycling one billion pounds of hardware, six months before the deadline it had set back in 2004.

(Re)structuring your team

<p>I'm a fan of win-win situations. But what do you do when you have a team member that's not pulling his weight? I look at this very common situation in today's post.</p>