Opinion

When PCs don’t snooze, you lose

Companies are waking up to the fact that powering down systems after hours can reap significant cost and energy savings.

A new chapter

You may notice today that there is now another blog bearing my name and my opinions out on the web. As of today, I will be moving my blog activities to CNET. I've loved blogging here for the past two years – Dave and InfoWorld have been fantasti

Diagnosing health care IT

Kaiser’s medical records odyssey reveals basic truths about doctors, IT, and resistance to change

Advertisement: MuleSource is hiring!

Now that we raised the B round we are on a hiring spree. So far things are going great with the exception of the non-stop barrage of annoying/obnoxious recruiters who call several of us every day and spam us all with crappy candidates. Do us all a f

Back to the front…Dave returns to the blog world

After a 6 week absence from the blogebrity ranks (not a big loss since Matt is the real star here) I am back in blog form. A lot of people think that big life changes (in my case a kid) makes you all introspective and self-aware. I can confidently sa

Leadership term limits

<p>I've recently moved on to a new role after 5 years leading day to day operations in my computer center. This change has reminded me of something I realized at the start of my career: leaders should not serve indefinitely. In fact, if I

Vendors are people too

Conference day-dreaming

OpenAds nabs some funding

I promised Bryce not to blog this until the round closed, and it's been painful. I think OpenAds is one of the coolest applications of open source in some time. I'm glad to see Danny Rimer and Bryce Roberts, two of my favorite people and VC

Start Planning Today for an iVista Future!

Time for a little crystal ball gazing! Let’s fast forward 12 months and see what we’ll be writing about here at the Enterprise Desktop Blog… Now that Apple has effectively conceded the OS war by porting Safari to Windows, it's

Naivete is the heart of open source

Or maybe I should say a lack of guile. But naivete works, too. I just spent an engaging hour talking with Glyn Moody, author of Rebel Code and Digital Code of Life (which I had not heard of but which sounds fascinating – talks, at least in part, abou

SMB Tech News Today; 6/13

* Glitz comes off the iPhone. Well, maybe maybe not. Jobs told programmers at Apple's Worldwide Developers' Conference that as far as mobile applications were concerned, the iPhone is a mobile Safari browser. Sounds cool when you mumble AJA

Outside the inner circle

Dear Bob …I am working in an IT related field with SW and with people. We have a small team of less then 10 people and good communication skills are essential to do our job. Good "team spirit" is not a bad thing either, considering that w

Test Center Tracker: VMware Fusion beta shows promise

Fresh from the Test Center: For once, VMware is following in someone else's footsteps: Now that Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac is out, it's VMware's turn to address the Mac market. Paul Venezia says the Fusion Beta 4 isn't quite up

Surfin Safari

Pop quiz time. Please sharpen your number 2 pencils and complete the following sentence: What the world needs now is a) love sweet love b) more media coverage of Paris Hilton behind bars c) another Windows browser. If you answered “c” you

Is iPhone out of business?

Jobs tells developers that for them, iPhone is purely a portable browser. Microsoft, Nokia, and RIM rejoice. At Macworld Expo in January 2007, Steve Jobs told the crowd that Apple's upcoming mobile device, iPhone, runs OS X. I think that it&#039

SharePoint library: No non-geeks allowed

Not just anyone should have access to SharePoint's spruced-up document libraries

O’Reilly’s Executive (Open Source) Radar

Tim just released a preview of this year's Executive Radar at OSCON. I helped put it together last year ("helped" being the operative term – Tim completely overhauled my anemic efforts to make the program into something worth listening

IBM aims to double datacenter space, maintain energy use

CIOL reports that Big Blue plans to double its datacenter capacity to 12 million square feet without increasing wattage.

VMLogix LabManager and IBM Streamline Software Development

Recently, I had the opportunity to spend some time speaking with Mark Angelo, Director of Business Development at VMLogix, where we were able to talk about the company's latest release – LabManager 2.8 – as well as discuss the product's sup

Testing Assumptions

Dell Latitude D630 notebook scores gold status for green

Latitude D630 the first and currently only notebook on market to meet the highest EPEAT rating

Bush, Kennedy aren’t giving up on immigration legislation

For those who didn't believe me when I said the immigration bill wasn't dead, despite headlines to the contrary in all the major papers, well, today's headlines are quite different. See "Bush and Kennedy talk compromise over Senat

Tech companies unite to tackle desktop energy waste

Intel, Google, Dell, HP, IBM, Lenovo, Microsoft, Sun, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), MIT, Red Hat, and Starbucks, along with some 20-plus other organizations, announced the launch of the Climate Savers Compu

Backbase offers AJAX for enterprises

Backbase introduced its Ajax 360 package this week, which provides AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) development capabilities for enterprises. AJAX is a popular technique for building rich Internet applications. Ajax 360 is intended to address c

If LAMP is so easy, why isn’t Java dead?

This is the question that Peter Yared asks in his blog, and it's fascinating given that he founded a company (ActiveGrid) based on the premise that Java was going to get shunted aside, as Stephen O'Grady notes. My company, Alfresco, is Java

US Patent Office experiments with open source (approach)

As BetaNews reports, the US Patent & Trademark Office is taking widespread complaints seriously in how it approaches a crush of patent applications:As urgent appeals for lawmakers to finally address multiple defects in US patent law appear to fin

Open source database wars: the Lumen example

I remember once asking Marten Mickos to participate on a panel – "The Battle of the Databases" – for Linuxworld a year or two back. He declined. At the time, I was mildly annoyed at his sense of camaraderie – he didn't think it was pro

Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit…SOA, SOA, SOA

I'm at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development &amp; Integration Summit in Nashville this week, as a few of you know, perhaps you are here. The sessions have been pretty good, albeit a bit on the high level side of things…bu

SMB Tech News Today; 6/12

* Senators looking to block patent overhaul. A group of senators (republicans) backed by a few large tech vendors are looking to delay a bill that would rework the much-maligned US patent system. Legal pending? (Source: InfoWorld) * AVG mobile AV com

Email survey says: “Exchange 2007 is a big jump”

I spent some time talking with Michael Osterman of Osterman Research, which today announced a survey it completed dealing with enterprise email. The survey was conducted with 100+ enterprises that have an average of 6,636 e-mail users. It was commiss

Is Google ‘hostile to privacy’?

Privacy International has released preliminary findings of its study of privacy practices at 20 major Net companies, and has named Google the worst of a generally bad lot. In its cheerfully color-coded system, only Google receives PI's black spo

Test Center Tracker: A developer’s eye view of Leopard

Feature-spotting on Leopard: InfoWorld Chief Technologist and Mac enthusiast Tom Yager has his hands full of Apple-y deliciousness tthis week as he attends WWDC 2007. Not only did he deliver a "real-time" account of Steve Jobs's keynot

Seeking the Illusive SOA Stack

Seeking the Illusive SOA Stack Download file…

Parlez-vous IT?

Something told me the project was doomed to fail. I think it was because it had been designed entirely in French! In 2001, before CRM had moved into the domain of the mid-market, I had been IT Manager at a small technology company. I had just taken t

Apple iPhone in the enterprise

The iPhone may help make a market for dual-mode devices, but the technology may not be ready for the market No doubt the Apple iPhone will create a stir regarding the kind of services and applications dual-mode devices can deliver. But the success of

Are Unfair Takedowns Becoming EBay’s Trademark?

We've had quite a few stories here (see "Embroidery Piracy and EBay/PayPal Privacy" for example) about abuses of the power EBay's Verified Rights Owner (VeRO) programs gives vendors to arbitrarily take down auctions. But while mos

InfoWorld’s Virtualization Report Goes to Microsoft TechEd 2007

This year, I was lucky enough to attend Microsoft TechEd in Orlando. For those of you who stopped by the exhibitor booth that I was working, it was great to meet you. While the show doesn't concentrate on virtualization, it did cover the gambit.

Symantec Updates Altiris Software Virtualization Solution

While attending Altiris ManageFusion, I was able to meet with Scott Jones, Altiris Product Manager for Software Virtualization Solution. When we spoke about the Symantec/Altiris acquisition, I asked him whether or not he knew if Symantec understood w

PlateSpin Receives Virtualization Technology of the Year Award

In a recent press release, PlateSpin announced that they had won the 2007 "Virtualization Technology of the Year" award as part of The Banker Technology Awards. The Banker Technology Awards are backed by The Financial Times UK and recognize

Microsoft Releases Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1

Emerging from Beta today, Microsoft has released Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. There had been some discussion about the release being delayed as late as July, but here it is. Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 now provides improved performance for no

Microsoft Details Windows Server 2003 Licensing with Virtualization Technologies

When you read about Microsoft Windows Server licensing, more often than not, the message is negative. Microsoft seems to be taking it on the chin a lot, but really for such a large software company, I think they are doing a fairly good job at trying

Why Do I Blog?

Mac Leopard: Not enough to make PC users switch

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, took developers on a fly-by tour at the 50,000-foot level of Leopard, the next version of OS X. Leopard will ship in October. For more details on Leopard and the keynote, go here. Of the claimed 300 new features in Leopard,

Is Jobs just like the wizard behind the curtain in Apple-Oz-land?

Monday, Steve Jobs took center stage, a place that he seems quite comfortable in, and gave a cheering crowd of 5,000 developers at the WWDC07 a not quite close-up look at the platform for developers who want to create applications for the iPhone. Not

Project Blackbox: shake test

You may recall that I wrote about Sun's Project Blackbox as "crackpot technology." Today I received a follow-up email from Mark Richardson at Sun: Martin, I thought you might find this YouTube video interesting:http://www.youtube.com/w

The news goes online while software goes open

It's happening on TV, too. It turns out, as Paul Kedrosky captures, that news doesn't happen on TV anymore. It breaks first on the Internet.Some fascinating stuff going on when you get beneath the respective hoods of CNN's decline and

Selling customer empathy

Paul Kedrosky showcases this this interview with IDEO founder David Kelley. I found this particular comment fascinating and appropriate for how open source works:We don't believe in this notion of a bunch of smart people sitting around being cle

Building tomorrow’s open source leaders

I am, quite possibly, the most anti-social person on this planet. This makes it all the more surprising that I bumped into Rick Statile, counsel for Red Hat, while in line at Passport Control at London's Gatwick Airport on Sunday. Rick and his w

Alternative-power datacenter part of Rackspace green initiatve

New green facility, carbon offsets part of managed datacenter-hosting company's eco-friendly initiative