Opinion

Cologne Java IDE Shootout: Rashomon

One of my favorite films of all time is the 1950 Kurosawa classic Rashomon. In this movie, a horrible crime is committed in the woods of Japan, and we see it recounted from the point of view of each character, including the victim's ghost. Each

More on hot talk and high tech

First, apologies are in order to Cringester D. F., who contributed yesterday's gem about Dell's accidental foray into the phone sex biz and underwent an inadvertent sex change in the process. "He" is actually a she. Sorry for that

The war of the hidden motives

Sometimes systems don't work because people have a vested interest in keeping them broken Three years ago, I landed what I thought was a dream job. I had been working as a freelance Web developer, and my impressive portfolio proved useful when t

SaaS gains enterprise cred

Google's Postini acquisition and Salesforce's development capabilities lend enterprise-level chops to the software-as-a-service model With two important announcements, one this week and one last, we are finally starting to see a critical ma

Roxio Takes Vista Compatibility to New Level

<P>Since <a href="http://www.gripe2ed.com/scoop/story/2007/7/3/02745/71308">we've just seen</A> how some hardware manufacturers might be dragging their feet on Vista compatibility, it's only right we take a look

Celebrating wins

Looking Away

Sometimes I just have to look away. Once in a while, I see something that I feel must be embarrassing to the person experiencing it and not wanting to be a rubbernecker I look aside. This happens to me a lot on the golf course when someone is having

Open Source at Dow Jones Enterprise Innovations Summit

On Wednesday July 18th the Dow Jones Enterprise Innovations Summit has a host of open source companies presenting. I will be there slinging heresy, hearsay and horror stories from the trenches. Presenting Companies (starting at 10:30am): MuleSource S

Intel Signs Up for OLPC

Intel, which until recently had been promoting it's own "ClassMate" low-cost computing design (and criticizing Nicholas Negroponte's efforts) has now joined the One Laptop Per Child project along side AMD, Google, Red Hat and othe

How Emulex and IBM are Working with Virtualization and Storage

Virtualization can certainly help lower the number of physical servers in your datacenter or environment, but that doesn't usually mean that the need for storage goes away. In fact, moving to virtualization in my opinion really increases the nee

Software issues? Consider the source.

Moving SOA to Verticals

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Nokia launches mobile app dev contest

Nokia is looking for mobile application developers to use the company's Open C environment and has launched a contest in a quest to meet this goal. The "Open C Challenge" is focused on development of applications for the S60 smartphone

More about values

My recent post, "Are values personal or universal – and why it matters," (Advice Line, June 24, 2007) generated a great deal of commentary. It's worth your time to read.I thought two of the comments warranted direct responses. One said

Virtual Iron and Tech Data Announce Distribution Agreement

Tech Data Corporation and Virtual Iron announced that Tech Data would be the first U.S. distributor to offer value-added resellers (VARs) solutions from Virtual Iron. Tech Data will support VARs deploying Virtual Iron and other datacenter solutions t

Dell’s hot new line of business

Cringe regular D. F. believes he may have discovered how Dell plans to turn itself around – by engaging in new and more&nbsp;provocative side businesses. D. F., an east coast reseller, asked Dell for a couple of quotes on systems for his clients.

The cool new look in datacenter design

Rising energy costs have enterprises outfitting and retrofitting server rooms with modular localized cooling solutions

The continued greening of IT

Saving greenbacks convinces more companies to go green

Lustre moves to ZFS on Linux, NVIDIA releases GPU API, IBM and APC hook up, and more

<p>In today's enterprise HPC roundup, CFS moves their Lustre filesystem to Sun's ZFS on Linux everywhere, NVIDIA releases version 1.0 of their GPU API, IBM and APC hook up, and more.</p>

Microsoft ‘Shrink-Wrapped SOA’ Coming in September

It's amazing to watch Microsoft continually be so clueless. 'Shrink-Wrapped SOA' is oxymoronic minus the oxy. Regardless of the vendor, SOA "stacks" defeat the whole purpose of having a loosely-coupled architecture. Show me a

Competing with the wrong companies (Hint: go after proprietary not other OSS)

On Competition and the Open Source Ghetto I remain frustrated by the complete lack of marketing and business sense that many open source companies continue to display. I thought that we were past the whole foolishness of competing in the ghetto among

Softwar – An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle

I've been reading Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle recently. The book is interesting because it's written by Matthew Symonds, an author from The Economist, but Ellison gets to add footnotes explaining his side at th

Vizioncore Offers Virtual Disaster Recovery for SMBs

Vizioncore announced that it was delivering Virtual Disaster Recovery for SMB (VDR for SMB), an enterprise-class and cost-effective disaster recovery product bundle for the small and medium-sized business market. It is being targeted at customers wit

InfoWorld Puts Virtual Iron and XenSource to the Test

As virtualization industry giant VMware continues to grab at marketshare, other companies in the industry are attempting to face VMware head on in the battlefront. Two contenders making a play for the SMB market are Virtual Iron and XenSource. As the

Virtualization Software Tool Provider Invirtus Makes Changes

Invirtus, a third-party virtualization solution provider creating applications to assist with efficiency and automation of virtual machine technology, continues to make changes to its management team to help push their technology and company forward.

XenSource Offers Free Virtual Disk Migration Tool

For all the capabilities that virtual machine disk files bring to the IT table, there is one issue that stands out to me that sometimes makes my life difficult – virtual hard disk format compatibility between virtualization vendors, or should I say l

PHP4 EoL – How will Users React?

The PHP development team officially announced PHP 4 end of life (EoL): The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will

More on the Common Data Model Thing

Sometimes when I find other blogs referring to my blog it's just a matter of reflection…"here's a good idea" and all that. Sometimes, however, they add good ideas. Case in point is Jean-Jacques Dubray's post on InfoQ t

What are IDC and Forrester Saying About Virtualization?

The virtualization market is a fast growing marketspace. And it's extremely interesting to see what the analyst firms think as they report their forecasts on the technology and the market. Case in point, analyst firm IDC recently came out with t

Human Mechanics: Why buzzwords make startups unlikely to hire you

As I posted a while back we are hiring at an alarming rate. Sadly it's not the glorious task that I had so hoped it would be. There was a week where we interviewed 40 people and hired 2 of them, which I think is actually not a bad percentage but

Virtual PC 2007: The Great CPU Gobble!

Ever since VMRC Plus came out I've been spending more and more time with Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. As you may recall, I extolled the virtues of VMRC Plus a week or so ago, and since then I've been reaping the benefits of VS 2005 as a test

OSCON July 23-27

O'Reilly's OSCON, the original and perhaps best open source conference takes place in Portland Oregon July 23-27. I've been going to OSCON for a few years now, and it's a good place to see open source "in the wild." Yes,

Vista User Account Control, Redux: Script Elevation Power Toys

Randall Kennedy has learned from running Linux that UAC is probably a Good Thing: Enterprise Desktop | InfoWorld | Learning to Live with UAC | July 11, 2007 08:43 AM | By Randall Kennedy. I came to similar conclusions in March. At the time, I bewaile

LA Flash users to gather

Los Angeles area Flash users are gathering Saturday to hone their skills in developing rich media experiences for the Web, desktop and mobile devices. The LA Flash Adobe User Group is holding its LAFLashapaloozastock 2 event, featuring speakers from

Anti-phishing techniques for the real world

We need mutual authentication not just on the Internet, but also for more mundane forms of communication

Storage spending at a crossroads

Adding to the infrastructure is the traditional way of beefing up storage, but new offerings could sway more dollars toward services

Best Buy “No Lemon” Buyer is Bitter

Many of my readers think that you're more likely to be struck by lightning than to have an extended warranty turn out to be worthwhile. But one reader who bought into Best Buy's promise of a no-lemon guarantee on its extended warranties dis

Pssst…wanna buy a used router?

Regardless of what some of the network equipment manufacturers might say, used networking equipment is a reality of life. The problem is that they're some folks out there that are preying on the unsuspecting by selling them gear that's fall

Tahoe SDK Update

Embedded Fusion is in the process of making the accelerometer board I mentioned&nbsp;here&nbsp;available for purchase on their site. In the mean time, they can be purchased by contacting sales@embeddedfusion.com. &nbsp;There isn’t a

SaaS vs. OSS? Users choose SaaS, next question.

Tim O'Reilly has an interesting post on why the GPLv3 took a pragmatic approach when it came to the "SaaS loophole" (i.e. SaaS apps aren't redistributed; no redistribution means SaaS vendors can use GPLv2 code with modifications a

Phoenix: Beyond the Stellar Empire

Those of you who read my late, lamented&nbsp;Byte column may recall that I started playing Phoenix: Beyond the Stellar Empire a few years ago. Given my general busy-ness level, which for new clients typically&nbsp;ranges from "I'm b

IBM Pushes Business not Technology…Okay

It had to happen, just when a space gets hot somebody had to state the obvious…"It's about the business." That's the case with IBM this week announcing eight industry-specific roadmaps for SOA. IBM also announced the result

Want to Try XenEnterprise 4.0 Before it is Released?

If you are interested in getting a sneak peak at what XenSource is going to be offering in its next major release, XenEnterprise 4.0, look no further. XenSource has opened up registration to allow people to Beta test the 4.0 version of its server vir

IBM offers AIX beta program

IBM announced Thursday an open beta program for AIX, the company's Unix operating system. Version 6 of AIX exploits the Power 6 microprocessor, which offers advances in energy conservation and virtualization, IBM said. AIX runs on IBM System p U

Open the floodgates to IT immigration

Forget about H-1B. What we need is fast-track citizenship for every developer who wants to work in the United States

Intel Invests $218 Million in VMware – Not First Time at the Rodeo

Intel Corporation made a significant investment in VMware this week through its global investment arm – Intel Capital. The company announced that it will invest $218.5 million in the virtualization giant, giving them approximately 2.5 percent of VMwa

Google Market Cap Exceeds IBM

Last week, Google stock (nasdaq:GOOG) hit an all-time high of $541 with a market cap of $169 billion (yes, with a B). That put their value higher than IBM's and on par with Cisco. Not bad for a company with an open source infrastructure. But ala

Study: Smart metering poised to take off

London-based market analyst Datamonitor predicts that smart metering will reach 89% penetration in North America and 41% penetration in Europe by 2012.

Common Data Model and SOA

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Learning to Live with UAC

Like most veteran Windows users, I balked when I first encountered the User Account Control (UAC) mechanism in the latter BETAs of Vista. The constant interruption of nearly every system or maintenance related task was unbearable. Finally, after one