Opinion

Is Red Hat Exchange DOA?

Via Dana & Matt, The Register reports that the Red Hat Exchange (RHX) "roars like a muted lamb". The Register's point is that RHX has met with a lukewarm reception to date. After reading the following comment from Matt, with his VP

Yahoo’s Greylist Gets Into Grey Area

<P>Sometimes it's hard to tell what's worse – spam or the spam filtering methods some companies decide to use to stop it. That's certainly what one reader was left wondering after wrestling with what appears to be a very poor imp

Microsoft boosts Office apps

Microsoft published Friday two additional Office Business Application (OBA) Reference Application Packs (RAP), which guide developers and architects on the applicability of Microsoft's Office Business Applications to industry-specific challenges

Why even have a Database?

I stay amazingly perplexed and annoyed at the state of DBs in this world. By now I'm sure it's no shock to many companies that DBs exist and that they can be used to store data. What I'm also very sure of is that a lot of them just don

When Thinking SOA think DFSS

Those that are creating an SOA are jumping right to services, and in most cases that's a huge mistake. I understand that the S in SOA is services, however, without a good foundation of data understanding you're creating services won't

Geek week in review

Wait, don't tell me. Something big is happening today, but I can't seem to put my finger on it. Hmmm… what could it be? iPhone, therefore I am. Whatever you think of Steve Jobs (saint or sinner, macher or mensch) you have to admire how th

Test Center Tracker: BeyondTrust review and Tablus Content Sentinel screencast

Fresh from the Test Center: Think you have to allow everyone admin rights in order to keep those pesky installation requests from bogging down your inbox? Not a good idea, especially considering the security risks of extending installation rights to

Who Wants to Virtualize the Desktop?

While server virtualization is the talk of the town, more and more people and companies are talking about virtualizing the desktop. We started out virtualizing the desktop with products from VMware and Connectix, and then moved to the server. Now, we

IIS vs. Apache: Re-examining the statistics

Can IP addresses ever be used for accurate statistical analysis of malicious Web sites?

Classic Storage Insider, part II

Two columns from the past take a closer look at storage management

Asay: “Community Capitalism” presentation online

I recently keynoted the JA-SIG Conference in Denver, CO. For those who don't know (as I didn't), JA-SIG is a Java organization focused on the Higher Education industry, with a strong open source bent (Sakai, uPortal, etc.). As such, I talke

Carpal Tunnel Syndrome

It seems I'm not the only open source guy currently suffering from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Carpal Tunnel is a Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) typically caused by too much typing combined with bad ergonomics. Not only do heavy-duty computer users

.NET Micro Framework: Tahoe Development Kit

Last week I told you&nbsp;about a conversation I had with Colin Miller, the manager of the Microsoft SPOT group, about the .NET Micro Framework. Since then, I have installed the .NET Micro Framework SDK, along with the EmbeddedFusion Tahoe Develo

Microsoft upset over apparent death of immigration bill

I thought this alert sent by Microsoft to the media was worth posting. And if you believe this, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you. Statement by Pamela Passman, Vice President, Global Corporate Affairs, Microsoft Corp June 28, 2007 "WASHI

Why grandma, what big attorneys you have

Just when you thought they can't get any slimier, the Recording Industry Association of America manages to squirm even deeper into the muck. The RIAA is being sued by a 44-year-old diabled Oregon woman whom it tried and failed to take down in it

Dell chills with Emerson

Companies say server and cooling bundle can deliver an 80 percent increase in system performance

Zend Framework 1.0 due out on Monday

It's based on PHP 5, limiting its use by the majority of PHP developers who don't like/understand OO programming, or simply, are happy with PHP 4 thank you very much. But the audience seems to be enterprise developers that want to take adva

Endless Vistas

I had to share the latest Vista error message. After clicking on Help from within the Palm conduit software, this popped up:——————————Why can't I get Help from this program?The Help for this program was created in Windows Hel

GPL v3 on the way…Palamida trying to help make it easier to understand

Palamida announced that it has enhanced it's IP Amplifier product with the addition of the GPL v3 analyzer functionality. The company has also created a comprehensive GPL v3 online educational resource repository, gpl3.palamida.com, to assist or

Dunes Updates VS-O 3.1 and Offers Virtual Appliance

Dunes Technologies announced an upgrade of its Virtual Service Orchestrator (VS-O) software that helps keep virtual machine sprawl in check and offers full automation of virtual datacenters. The Dunes VS-O 3.1 new Web 2.0-based front-end extends prev

NEC and XenSource Sign Collaboration Agreement

XenSource has signed a new agreement with NEC that it hopes will help push demand and expand the market for its XenEnterprise server virtualization platform. This agreement gives the virtualization upstart access to an OEM with a well respected globa

Five technologies more pressing than the iPhone

From reducing cyberloafing to ending spam, admins have plenty more to worry about than Apple's new gadget

Web 2.0 fosters healthy disrespect

Corporate America could sure use a little help from Aretha Franklin, because big, established companies just aren't getting enough r-e-s-p-e-c-t

The healthy carbon diet

Companies preoccupied with their bulky carbon footprints should opt for healthy conservation over "lite" carbon offsets

Intellectual Dishonesty

Open source is about new beginnings for me. While many write about the end of closed-source and the intellectual property racketeers, I’m more interested in the end of the beginning for the new model that will displace the intellectual property

Red Hat Announces Solid 1Q08 Results – Stock down?!

Red Hat announced results for its Fiscal 1Q08 quarter ended May 31, 2007. Pretty solid results. Revenue rose 41% to $118.9 million from $84.0 million. The analyst consensus was $117.12 million. GAAP net income rose 17% to $16.2 million, or 8 cents a

Still no Focus on the “A” of SOA

Back from the SOA World conference held in NYC. I was only there for a day, but enjoy my short time at the conference including meeting practitioners and vendors. I'm seeing the same people at all of these SOA conferences, including vendors and

How ready are you for disaster recovery

Guest Post: Stuart Cohen, Collaborative Software Initiative

Stuart Cohen, former CEO of OSDL launched a new company in May. The Collaborative Software Initiative offers a comprehensive set of services to take a project from the assessment phase through its lifecycle and beyond. The practice of collaboration

Senators open inquiry of L-1 visa program

In response to a bipartisan request by Senators Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Richard Durbin, D-Ill., the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services provided the names of all companies that use L-1 visas. Now Senators Grassley and Durbin are open

Off-topic: Someone needs to invite me to the Cisco Networkers Event

Seems that KISS is playing at the Cisco Networkers event. Someone hook me up. I will bore you with tales of open source and trade you a Mule T-shirt for an invite/ticket/whatever….

SGI’s new super for the enterprise, getting out of the multicore software crisis, IBM’s Cluster 1350 upgrades, and more

<p>In today's enterprise HPC news roundup we've got quick links to the major big iron announcements coming out of ISC in Dresden, help getting out of the multicore software crisis, SGI new super for the enterprise, and much more.</

Marten Mickos on living in the “modern online world”

Computerworld has Marten Mickos on the hot seat about the growth of MySQL and what happens next. As always, Marten is insightful and rational. I am jealous that I am not as clear-headed. I am very passionate about open source. And I do believe that i

Is Microsoft ready for people?

“People-ready business.” That's Microsoft's latest slogan from hell, and it probably would have passed quietly into the dustbin of marketing history had it not been for a recent blowup in the blogosphere. In an effort to inject

Ruby on Rails IDEs: More Free Options

The comments to&nbsp;my posting&nbsp;about Ruby on Rails IDEs on Monday have reminded me about other free options for Ruby on Rails development. First, there's NetBeans 6.0. I didn't really think about that when I was writing, becau

Test Center Tracker: Review of PGP NetShare, and iPhone countdown continues

Fresh from the Test Center: Encryption is the name of the game, and PGP's NetShare version 9.6 does a good job of locking down folders and files. It's user-friendly, letting the employees themselves create the authorized user lists for prot

Developing an IT strategy

Dear Bob …My boss asked me to develop an 'IT Strategy' for our company. I don't really have an idea of how to start and what to include.Can you give some advice and pointers?- StrategizingDear Strategizing …I thought you knew – you

Agiliance weaves together governance, compliance, and security management

IT governance involves measuring risk, taking appropriate security measures, and reassessing both risk and security at regular intervals. It's a difficult job made harder by the fact that these processes are typically managed separately. A new s

The GPL and VCs

A few weeks ago Slashdot was abuzz with the question Does GPL v3 Alienate Developers? The question was partly driven by William Hurley's post that questioned the value of GPL v3 in an age where developers seek permissive licenses. I haven't

iPhone: Apple answers all the big questions

Yes, it’ll cost you, and yes, Apple wants your SSN in iTunes. But you’ll want one anyway Whatever plans I might have had for this week were put on hold by Apple’s full opening of iPhone’s kimono prior to the June 29 launch. I

Balancing old and new

Cone of silence

Off-topic: CIA Family Jewels (The Mafia was hired to kill Castro?)

This CIA "family jewels" data dump is completely nuts. Top Ten Most Interesting "Family Jewels" Released by the CIA to the National Security Archive, June 26, 2007 1) Journalist surveillance – operation CELOTEX I-II (pp. 26-30) 2)

Virtualization Doesn’t Make Backups Go Away

For those of us living and breathing the datacenter life day in and day out, we know the value of our last good backup of data… you know the one, the one right before a major catastrophe strikes and someone in the organization decided it was "

Sprint talks turkey with mobile developers

The Mobile Application Platforms and OS conference held this week in San Francisco offered a unique opportunity to listen in on a conversation between the mobile platform designers and carriers and developers. Unfortunately, not all of the speakers w

Sun’s (Re-)Emergence as a Performance Leader

While many in the industry have written off Sun at one time or another as a has-been of the dot com era, it's interesting to see that some of their bets in the last few years are starting to pay off. Although I'm not quite ready to say that

iPhone JVM, Flash hacks could face Apple roadblock

Mobile operators took center stage this week in San Francisco (PDF file), talking very frankly at times with the audience, which consisted mainly of developers and snoopers like me. I will tell all in later post about the presentations, which touched

Some Code you might Enjoy

I wrote this code the other day that disables all user logins in SQL Server 2000. If you have the need to be the only one on the server in SQL for doing maint, troubleshooting, etc., then you'll find this useful. I've given you both the adh

How much does MySQL make?

Reading Dave's post on MySQL's IPO range of $600M – $1B, I started to wonder what type of revenue we're talking about. If you have access to IDC's massive pivot table with Software Vendor revenues (license & support only – ser

Test Center Tracker: Cover your data assests

Fresh from the Test Center: Hidden throughout every nook and cranny of your corporate LAN is an assortment of sensitive information, like private data and intellectual property. Surely you want to protect it, but keeping track of it all is no easy ta