Opinion

Startups on the Cheap

Guy Kawasaki has posted a few recent entries over on his blog about starting a company without venture capital and without the typical lofty business plan. Instead, just test the idea in the real world. Thanks to open source software, cheap hardware

Unauthorized e-mail and what to do about it

Dear Bob …With respect to this week's KJR ("Roving e-mail," 7/1/2007):Not that they ever would give this answer on the record but what do you do if your users tell you they are using an external system in order to evade legal require

Dell partners with Liebert, IBM’s Power6 software tax, and Intel gets creative

<p>In today's enterprise HPC update we look at IBM's Power6 software premium, the Dell-Liebert partnership, and Intel's contribution to the latest Disney-Pixar film.</p>

Bill’s Billions

It's a momentous day here on the planet that Microsoft lets us call earth. For the first time since 1994, Chairman William H. Gates III is no longer the richest biped on the planet. In the race to see who can die with the most money, Gates has f

Test Center Tracker: It’s SAN-tastic

Midrange SANs master high-end features: Midsize companies in search of some bang for their SAN buck have cause for celebration: There are systems on the market that are packed with impressive capabilities, as well as potential to grow with your needs

Spidering phantom blogs for IT best practices

Best practices can turn up in the most unlikely places and can even sound counterintuitive at first

Fast guide to fancy SAN management

From automated data migration to virtualization, these high-end features have made their way down to midrange storage systems

Power delivery, the smart way

Congress contemplates upgrading the nation's dumb electricity-delivery infrastructure to a smart grid

Yahoo deems city with three hazardous waste sites “greenest”

Hastings, Neb. has accomplished an impressive feat: Despite having three locations listed on the EPA's National Priorities List of hazardous waste sites, it's been deemed the greenest city in America — by Yahoo.

Why Virtualization Plays an Important Role in SaaS

SWsoft's Director of Technology, Ilya Baimetov, believes that virtualization plays an important role in the SaaS world. He even goes on to say that the benefits are so significant, that he belives no SaaS provider will be able to be competitive

TechWorld Announces 2007 Award Winners

With a record breaking number of product entries this year, TechWorld 2007 Award judges once again had the difficult task of choosing a winner in each category from a host of projects. The award presentation itself was held at the Gibson Hall in cent

VMware Fusion One Step Closer to General Availability

If you're from another planet or just haven't heard the news yet, VMware is one step closer to releasing its Intel-based Mac virtualization product – VMware Fusion. Yesterday, VMware came out and said that Fusion 1.0 is now feature complete

Downtime

Virtualized Vista Sucks on Linux, Too!

Last week I wrote about the poor performance of Windows Vista under the VMware Workstation and Microsoft Virtual PC environments. I noted that Vista was slower than it should be under virtualization, almost as if something – a poorly written kernel d

That was Really Horrible

There's an odd New England tradition celebrated on the 4th of July: a Horribles Parade. Andover still has one, and so do Beverly, Gloucester, Nahant, and Hopkinton, that I know of. I don't know about those other towns, but in Andover anyone

Developer Independence Day?

Evans Data Corporation yesterday announced the results of its survey of North American developers and concluded that Windows is losing ground to Linux as a platform for application development. Windows targeting decreased by 12% in the last year, it&

iPhone or die hard

The dust has settled, the news crews filming the crowds camped on the sidewalks outside Apple Stores have gone home, the iOrgy is over. And now it's time for the body count. Apple sold between 300,000 and 700,000 units over the weekend, dependin

Printers get smarter but less secure

Admins enjoy better management for network printers, but beware the security holes they open via SNMP

Hacking or reverse engineering?

Scientists are reverse engineering the galaxy. So why is it illegal to reverse engineer a DVD player or the iPhone? Even the debate pitting creationism against evolution never raises the argument that the galaxy is a secret that ought not be explored

iPhone: Correction/addition to SIM removal instructions

In iPhone: Setting the record straight…, I said that the iPhone SIM should be removed by inserting a hooked paper clip into the hole at the top of the device and pulling. Commenters chimed in to say that the SIM is removed by pressing a paper clip

Crisis and competence – an inverse correlation

Dear Bob …In your recent Keep the Joint Running, "Iacocca's alliterative leadership list," you made the point that leadership is easiest in a crisis.This comment leads me to a point I don't see covered: I view an essential part

Microsoft offers CTPs for .Net 3.5, ADO.Net

Microsoft released this week Community Technology Previews of its upcoming .Net Framework 3.5 and ADO.Net Entity Framework technologies. A June CTP of .Net Framework 3.5 is available here, following an earlier Beta 1 version. .Net Framework 3.5 featu

iPhone: Fool me once, fool me twice…

The drunken night with iPhone is over, and now as we wake up next to our new love, the sober reality is not as good looking as we thought. As we learn more about the device and its battery shortcomings, as night follows day, bad press is following go

Using a Common Data Model with SOA

Lately I've been hearing a lot about common data models when it comes to SOA. As organizations attempt to figure out the data in the context of SOA they are driven many times to the notion of a common way to view data as a part of the architectu

T-Mobile picks up iPhone contract in Germany

Ars Technica points to an unconfirmed report in Germany’s Rheinische Post (RP) that Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Mobile won out over rival Vodafone for the right to sell iPhone in Germany. Apparently the rest of Europe is still in play. This

Manage Your Microsoft Virtual Server Environment with VMRCPlus

A new and much needed tool has entered the Microsoft Virtual Server R2 SP1 world. Called VMRCPlus, this Virtual Machine Remote Control Client Plus tool is a welcomed addition to managing any Microsoft Virtual Server environment. The tool has been use

The Need to Focus on the A in SOA

Download file…

My unnatural disaster

Destruction is bad enough but when it's followed by incompetence, heaven help the victims In my world, Katrina wasn't the only disaster of 2005. I was a Linux administrator at a university that year. I use the past tense because shortly aft

Sun puts “Sparc” into Web 2.0

Company aims its Redshift initiative at expanding network loads Moore's law and the commoditization of server boxes had most of us believing that the days of big iron were over. For a while at least, it looked as if Intel and Windows Server woul

HP Teaches Driver Education

<P>At what point does a manufacturer's responsibility for updating its device drivers end? While that's not a question we can have any hope of answering definitively, a recent gripe from a reader about Vista driver support for his HP

Virtual Server: Now More Accessible Than Ever

I've always been a big fan of Microsoft Virtual Server on the desktop. A few weeks back I noted how VS was a powerful, free alternative to Virtual PC and even VMware, especially for users who need more robust CPU scheduling than the anemic, sing

Virtual Iron Quick Hits in the News

NEW 4.0 BETA Virtual Iron is launching a beta program to test the company's upcoming 4.0 release. If you are interested in participating, simply go here to the Beta survey page and answer the questions on the form. All registrations will be revi

Catbird Security’s Comprehensive Security Solution for Virtual Networks

Catbird Security announced the Catbird V-Agent security solution for virtual networks. Delivering broad hacker protection to virtual networks, the new Catbird V-Agent enables rogue virtual-device monitoring; Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) and Int

EMA Research Reveals Top 10 Successful IT Virtualization Strategies

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) senior analyst and virtualization expert, Andi Mann, recently spear-headed a comprehensive virtualization study and has now revealed some of those findings in his EMA Advisory Note. EMA conducted an extensive an

The Problem with Crippleware

A few weeks back, intrepid reporter Will Watts over at RegDeveloper in the UK broke a story about how Microsoft was threatening legal action against a developer for creating a unit testing extension to Visual Studio, known as TestDriven.Net. The stor

Multinationals show true colors in China

"Abandon hope all ye who enter." The lines above, from Dante's Divine Comedy, are the words that Dante said are engraved over the entrance to hell. What conjures these words to mind for me is a story in The New York Times from Saturday

Slogan’s Run

They say if you have to explain a joke it probably wasn't very funny in the first place. So it goes with my effort to inspire a new slogan for Microsoft. Some faithful readers wonder why I care about Microsoft's advertising campaigns. Short

The hard way: expressing your values and expectations in a formal presentation

<p>If you are suddenly assigned to an organization in which you have had no previous leadership role, or you are taking over an organization and radically changing the management style, you almost have to have a formal session where you introdu

Companies That Care About Open Source

Matt is interviewed at Dana's open source blog at ZDNet. "We sell primarily to places that also use Java, to companies that care about open source, and there are a lot. Open source is becoming a default for large companies. I’m seeing

Intel swings back at AMD, the 3 most important announcements from ISC, and more

<p>In this enterprise HPC news summary Intel announces a bump to its quad-core aimed at AMD's Barcelona launch, the three most important announcements from ISC last week, and Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz on why his company thinks it can make

It’s all about the perks

Techies are working harder for their higher salaries — so it’s time to think vacation

Ex-HPer Says HP, IBM, Others Susceptible To Open Source

IBD published a Q&A with Nora Denzel, who you might remember we spoke to back in January. IBD says the systems management market is led by HP, along with IBM, BMC Software and CA. Denzel says the Big Four are vulnerable to open source. A Gartner

Visual Studio 2008 Shell

When I wrote about free Ruby on Rails IDEs last Wednesday, I drew a comment from "teki321:" "I would never put 'Ruby in Steel' in the context of free. It's an extension for a commercial application, which is not free.&qu

iPhone: Setting the record straight on the good, the bad, the silly and the sleazy

Note: I know that I'm going to catch hell for my iPhone stories because, on balance, they seem slanted against Apple and AT&T. Read, and you'll find three things: One, that I am laying out the story fact by fact and presenting opin

How to not blurt

Dear Bob …In a recent KJR ("Iacocca's alliterative leadership list," 6/18/2007) you wrote "Effective communication is the result of planning, not blurting. It focuses on the audience's vocabulary and cares, not the leader&#

AMD announces ship for Barcelona, IBM and Fujitsu rev blades, and much more

<p>In today's enterprise HPC news roundup AMD announces ship for Barcelona, IBM and Fujitsu rev blades, the democratization of supercomputing, and much more.</p>

More Patents and New Business Models

David Kline left a comment regarding my blog on Intellectual Dishonesty. The ideas that David promotes in his comments deserve a little more exploration and I’d like to attempt to answer his question as well as invite others to do so. There are

Microsoft ALM tool offered on CodePlex

Microsoft has posted version 1.0 of its TFS Migration and Synchronization Toolkit on its CodePlex site for hosting of open source projects. The toolkit enables users of the company's Team Foundation Server software to build custom tools to migra

Energy bill spotlights datacenters

Legislation calls for development of benchmarks and standards for datacenter energy usage — similar to The Green Grid's goals

Design pattern standards