Opinion

Google, Salesforce miss the mark

Group Edition isn't the killer app the industry was hoping for Is the Google-Salesforce announcement of a new, jointly developed application just smoke and mirrors, or is it the start of something big? Certainly Group Edition, which combines Goo

Why SOA Governance Needs to Consider the Data

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Margin people and the bad deal

<p>We've talked about technology as a creative activity and the need to motivate creative people with leadership rather than trying to herd them through management. Despite the fact that the leadership approach works (and I think it works

CEOs Weigh in on Latest IDC Open Source Research

MS to OEMs: Get legit on Vista, or the OS is toast

Last week, Microsoft sent certified letters to its OEM partners regarding Vista's anti-piracy technology — or, more accurately, what happens if they dare ship a system with a "non-genuine" copy of Vista. (Thanks to two Cringesters, bo

Hands-on: GreenPrint cuts printing bills

Available both in a Home Edition and an Enterprise Edition, GreenPrint lets users preview a document before printing and easily select which pages not to print with simple clicks.

SMB Tech News Today; 6/4

UNBELIEVABLE!!!! How many articles have I written about the importance of *regular* backups?! Then I buy a new MacBook Pro with a piece of #$%^% Fujitsu hard disk and I don't back it up for four weeks straight because I'm waiting for a new

Test Center Tracker: Analyzing ASAP apps for Cisco switches

Switching things up: ASAP (aka Automated Switchport Access Provisioning) is "a PHP/Perl application that automates switchport VLAN assignments for Cisco switches," says Paul Venezia, who recently used ASAP while moving large switchsites fro

Road Signs, the Scan Button, and a Reunion

Seen on the Merritt Parkway near Fairfield, Connecticut: Caution: Depressed Storm Drains This brought up a mental&nbsp;image of Marvin the Paranoid Android. Then I imagined storm drains with a Point of View gun. As you can imagine from this state

Would you have allowed Bill Gates to be born?

This from MSNBC. Very funny. Btw, my response? Of course. He's done a huge amount of good for computing. I still think we in open source have much to learn from Gates. Not his sense of style, of course, because he has none. Just look at his soft

Microsoft patent deals: the last home of the dying (Updated)

And then there were two (software patent deals with Microsoft). Today, Xandros made its first newsworthy announcement in 10 years and indicated it has capitulated to Microsoft. I love how Microsoft tries to blur the lines between its patent folderol

In search of the best geek vacations

Plus: Introducing InfoWorld Mobile Alerts, our new Green IT newsletter, CTO 25 awards, and SOA Center

2007 InfoWorld CTO 25: Todd Schofield

CTO, International SOS

2007 InfoWorld CTO 25: Robert Lyons

Founder and CTO, Nextrials

2007 InfoWorld CTO 25: Antonio Nucci

CTO, Narus

2007 InfoWorld CTO 25: Sekhar Sarukkai

Founder and CTO, Securent

2007 InfoWorld CTO 25: K. Ananth Krishnan

CTO, Tata Consultancy Services

IDC: This open source market is getting big

Matt Lawton of IDC has a great job. He gets to spend his time analyzing open source business models and markets to see where it's all going. According to a research report he just released, it's going up. Way up. He has the standalone open

Adobe’s developer opportunity (Redmonk)

Michael Cote over at Redmonk has written an exceptional piece on Adobe's attempts to build out a developer ecosystem. Even more pertinently, he identifies a range of principles and practices that will help any company do so, and particularly wit

The ability to say no

Dear Bob …Thanks for the advice in "Positive traits to unlearn," Advice Line, 5/21/2007).Unfortunately for me (professionally and personally), I've not been able to put my own interests first. After 50 years that's unlikely to c

Adobe enables rich Internet apps with LiveCycle

Adobe Systems on Monday is introducing Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite (ES), its software for automating processes such as electronic forms. With the ES version of LiveCycle, the product expands beyond being an interactive, PDF-based environment to

With Technology Comes the Need for Security

Within technology, security has always been a major concern. With the introduction of the Internet and virtualization, computer technology choices, options and abilities have expanded, but so too have the potential for security threats. GreenBorder T

Picking apart Novell’s Linux numbers (Larry Dignan/ZDNet)

Larry has a great post that takes Novell's SUSE Linux numbers to task. Novell made much of its "83% jump in SUSE Linux revenues" but failed to highlight all the cracks in those numbers. Larry is much kinder than I would have been, but

Scalable SOA Solutions Continue to Emerge

Making solutions scale is nothing new. However, the SOA technology and approaches recently employed are largely untested with higher application and information and service management traffic loads. SOA implementers were happy to get their solutions

Windows Server Virtualization at TechEd 2007

If you are one of the 14,000 people expected to attend this year's Microsoft TechEd 2007 event in Orlando, FL next week, you might want to keep your eyes and ears open about various virtualization sessions. Over at the Windows Server Division We

Optimizing Your Data Center with Virtualization and Automation

If you haven't heard Simon Crosby, Founder and CTO of XenSource, speak before, you might want to consider signing up for this Webinar. I've heard him speak a few times at various forum events, and each time, I've enjoyed what he had to

Microsoft Overhauls Virtualization Calculator

Calculating your Microsoft licenses in a virtual world does not have to be a daunting task. At least, not anymore. After all, when trying to architect and implement your virtualization environment, you have enough to deal with like capacity planning,

Installing VMware ESX 3 on Workstation 6.0

Yes, you did read the title of the article correctly. We are talking about installing VMware's ESX Server inside of a virtual machine running on VMware's Workstation 6.0 product. Come on, we've all been there before. Who didn't tr

Parallels Launches Desktop for Mac 3.0 with 3-D Gaming to Boot

Parallels just announced that it has released a release candidate of Parallels Desktop for Mac 3.0. The release candidate is in the final stages of a Parallels private Beta testing program that has been going on for the last several months. The final

Open source is not a feature

I just got an email from a friend, and in the middle of the email he said something that struck me:Open source is not a feature. It is a way of life.Or, in other words, it's a way of doing business, not just a product feature. I think this is on

Dell responds on OptiPlex, Energy Star 4.0, and Vista

Dell spokesperson Jeremy Bolen was kind enough to offer a response to my post from yesterday about Dell's new OptiPlex systems, which are designed to meet the Energy Star 4.0 standards. But I still have questions about whether these systems can

Introducing ASAP – Automated Switchport Access Provisioning

…or something like that. ASAP is a PHP/Perl application that automates switchport VLAN assignments for Cisco switches. The good stuff: o- Web and telnet interface o- Can handle multiple switches across multiple sites o- All switch interaction is vi

Jobs envies Gates; Gates envies Jobs

In a mostly staid interview Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher did with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, one question elicited two very different, and very striking responses:Question from the audience: You approached the same opportunity so very differently.

Enterprise HPC News Weekly Wrap-up for June 01, 2007

In this week's enterprise HPC summary hardware startup Liquid Computing claims STREAM record, Star-P gets Python'd, the shakeup continues at Rackable, Celoxica gets all ROI on FPGAs, and much more.

Kudos to T-Mobile for sticking their neck out a bit…

So I've already written about my upgrading my T-Mobile Dash (aka HTC S620) from Windows Mobile 5 to Windows Mobile 6, and how I'm not quite willing to concede that WM6 is better than my past BlackBerry 7100t. What I have noticed is that the

Social (open source) production…and lawyers

Unfortunately, I think Luis is right. We need lawyers. We don't need them to go around erecting toll booths on the interoperability bridge, but we need them to help us think of how to look stodgy and dull while being cool and cutting edge.For be

Developer skills and code modularity: Does one trump the other?

I came across an interesting paper [PDF] today on the intersection between modularity and developer skill in open source projects. I'm often a cheerleader for greater modularity in software, open or closed, but this research (from Giuri Paola, M

Unnatural selection

More than 6,000 years after the universe was created, a museum dedicated to that glorious event has finally arrived. The Creation Museum opened its doors last Monday, bringing 4000 eager faithful back to the days when Man and dinosaurs lived in harmo

Maybe proprietary companies can offer good support, too (Oracle)

Kudos to Oracle for nabbing the SSPA's awards for "Best Knowledge Management Practices" and "Best Value-Added Support." I don't know much about the Services and Support Professionals Association, but assuming it's n

Test Center Tracker: Visual Studio beta review

Orcas Beta 1 surfaces: Wondering what's going on with the next version of Microsoft's Visual Studio? InfoWorld Contributing Editor Martin Heller took a look at the Orcas Beta 1, and found a lot to like, include the new design surface for WP

Microsoft Popfly: A First Look

My Popfly invitation came through&nbsp;during the Memorial Day weekend, and I signed myself up.&nbsp;Basically, you can create mashups online&nbsp;by dropping&nbsp;blocks on your design surface, setting their properties, and connecti

No peeking

I yielded to temptation and got fired, but my boss's transgressions were far worse… My boss at the state government entity had been taking equipment home, saying he was borrowing it for the weekend, and other similarly lame excuses. He borrowe

Betting on the future of parallel NFS

Panasas sacrifices one of its crown jewels to speed up adoption of the newest Network File System protocol

Ever-evolving malware is getting nastier

New trends toward Web-site based malware require alert, responsive monitoring and extra education

Software Snobs

I often think about how I got into MS products instead of say Oracle or IBM. It’s actually not all that hard to comprehend. I got into MS the same way most people get into their fields. MS was available to me. When I first started, I was in a v

Dell vague on Vista-friendliness of its Energy Star 4.0 PCs

Dell offers variants of its OptiPlex PCs that meet the new Energy Star 4.0 standard and run Vista — but which ones and how well?

Why SOA Governance Needs to do a Better Job with Data

As I've been looking at SOA governance solutions recently, I've been looking at a huge hole in the approach. While all SOA governance products do indeed consider the control and use of services, most are ignoring the data management issues,

Broadband Monopolies Have Charter to Steal

<P>It's funny how most of the gripes I hear about broadband service come from areas where the high-speed Internet service choices are very limited. Or maybe it's not so funny. It's certainly no laughing matter for one reader who

Bill + Steve: The love that dare not speak its name

Laurel and Hardy, Martin and Lewis, Gates and Jobs. Great comedy acts often work in pairs. That's how it was at this week's All Things D conference, aka Walt Mossberg's Geek Fest in the West, as the leaders of Apple and Microsoft share

SMB Tech News Today; 5/31

Thursday. So close to the weekend. Yet so far. * Google and Salesforce.com to announce deal next Tuesday. Not too many specifics yet, but the duo is obviously aiming at Microsoft's hosted version of its CRM and ERP systems. Possible treasure che