Opinion

Or maybe I’m just mad the football season is over

Maybe Microsoft's suggestion that open source developers and companies care less about respecting IP than it does (which is completely false) is not the reason for my ire. Maybe I'm just annoyed that I have to wait another three months to w

Making sense of Microsoft’s open source fetish

Microsoft is nothing if not consistent. The company – despite its feints and dodges with the Linux Lab and what-not – has been highly focused on feeding its anti-open source fetish. Today, that fetish reared its ugly head again. I've been waitin

Progress touts Actional for SOA

Progress Software is announcing on Monday its Actional 7 products, for SOA management. Actional 7 consists of three SOA management products: Progress Actional for SOA Operations, Progress Actional for Continuous Service Optimization and Progress Acti

Reading between the lines with Bill Hilf: Microsoft must really be hurting

I look at Microsoft's quarterly numbers, and the company seems to be doing well. Its two monopolies are firmly intact, and it's well on the way to building a third and fourth in Exchange and Sharepoint. Of course, there are a range of reaso

VMware Player – Free Virtualization Reaches 2.0

In December 2005, VMware made a breakthrough announcement as it introduced VMware Player to the market. Breakthrough, because during a period of virtualization price slashing, the product was announced as a free virtualization platform. Player was th

VMware Releases Second Edition of its ACE Product

It has been almost two and a half years since VMware originally announced the availability of VMware ACE, the company's virtualization product aimed at giving IT desktop managers the ability to rapidly provision customized, secure and standardiz

Viridian Features Trimmed – a Little off the Ears? Or Buzz Cut?

Days before one of Microsoft's largest events, Microsoft WinHEC 2007, the company announced that it was trimming three key features from its hypervisor technology, Microsoft Windows Server Virtualization (codenamed Viridian). The first feature,

SOA Exec Forum Next Week

I'm on a train on Monday heading up to NYC for the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum, taking place on Tuesday and Wednesday. I'll make sure to blog from the event as much as I can, for those of you who can't make it. On Tuesday I'm do

Nokia phones will remind users to unplug

Tired of people preaching, er, gently encouraging you to think green? Well, your cell phone might soon be doing the same. Nokia this week announced that some of its forthcoming phones will be programmed to "include alerts encouraging people to u

IT has the power to cultivate a greener world

Consensus continues to grow among political leaders around the world that global warming is a very probable threat that needs to be addressed. The latest evidence of this shifting mindset is the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report

Big Blue’s enviro guru explores garden of green opportunities

Political leaders and business leaders alike are scrutinizing causes of global climate change, as we saw in the recently released IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report. And they're devising solutions to the problem. And just as

The future of open source…more lock-in (?) (Tim O’Reilly)

Just when you think Tim is an optimist, he reminds you that he's somewhat of a realist. His post came in response to a quote from Nat Torkington, talking through the implications of Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun beating down the doors to open source

Searching for Intellectual Property

The Red Hat business model, Part II

I've written once on this topic before, but never with Red Hat's assistance. But yesterday I got to present the Red Hat subscription model with two members of Red Hat's legal team – the lovely Jennifer Venable and the ok-looking Rich B

Readers Write (Bite) Back

Should candidates have their own MySpace page, a la Obama? Cringesters who've emailed me respond with a resounding “No.” But reader W. O. offers up a capital idea: I don't know about MySpace, but it would be nice for all the can

My TechED Survival Guide

OK, with TechED just around the corner, I thought I'd shoot you guys a little list of things you can do to make TechED a little less miserable. It's not that the conference itself is miserable, it's just being out of town for a week, a

Test Center Tracker: Open-source Web services test tools

Fresh from the Test Center: Are your Web services up to snuff? Do they run smoothly, work the way they should? Are you sure? If you're looking for a lower-cost way to test them — and you and your staff have some solid development skills — chec

Silverlight Examples that Actually Work

When I posted about the book Getting Started with Silverlight last Friday, I made the incorrect assumption that the Silverlight examples mentioned in Shawn's book would work. Unfortunately, some of them were for a previous version of Si

Enterprise HPC News Weekly Wrap-up for May 11, 2007

In this week's summary the Java Parallel Processing Framework is revved, BusinessWeek talks up the future of big compute in big enterprise, competition makes odd bedfellows, hosted grid offerors work hard to lure skeptical users, and much more.

A small step to improve disk reliability

A larger block size could be just what the doctor ordered for recharging drive technology

Should vendors close all security holes?

Fix it or forget it? A reader presents an intriguing counterpoint

And you think I’m verbose…

Midnight is creeping up on me, and I'm just finishing edits to my 10-year old daughter's school paper. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. It is 10 pages long. Double-spaced, yes, but 10 pages?!? Scout (my daughter – yes, it'

The MySQL factor

I had dinner with Zack Urlocker (EVP of Products at MySQL) and Luis Sala (one of my very best hires, ever) last night in San Diego. We talked about a wide range of things, but spent a fair amount of time talking about the people at MySQL, and especia

Let a thousand open source flowers bloom

Back in my Lineo days, a colleague and friend (Craig Shank, now at Microsoft, and a fantastic person) once told me, after overhearing me apologizing profusely to someone over the phone, "Sheesh, Asay. When you fall on your sword, you fall hard!&

College Kid Learns Lesson About Dell’s Warranty

What is it about Dell and schools? Last year we had a story (see "Dell Gets a Failing Grade in School") about the failure rate of Dell computers in a high school. Now our recent discussions about useless extended warranties prompted another

The problem with disruption: you kind of have to do it to yourself (SAP)

Ah, disruption. It's so much fun to do to others, but uncomfortable when others are doing it to you. Or, in SAP's case, to oneself. As Steve Hamm writes, SAP's SaaS efforts seem destined to fail. Not because the company doesn't ha

Figments of the FSF’s imagination to be ironed out of the GPL

OK, that was a little too snide (especially given the respect I have for the Free Software Foundation). But I just read Paul Krill's Infoworld piece on the FSF's attempts to iron out incompatibilities between the GPL and other open source l

Plenty of ways to win through green initiatives

TV has the Emmys. The Internet has the Webbys. And California companies embracing sustainable, green technology and practices have the Flexys. OK, so they're not called Flexys; they're called the Flex Your Power (FYP) awards, and FYP doles

The two Internets

Like reality, the Internet has a liberal bias. Or so say the folks at Quantum Communications in Harrisburg, PA, who have launched QubeTV – a "YouTube for conservatives." Like the folks behind the Conservapedia, who decided the Wikiped

Red Hat launches Global Desktop

Red Hat at the Red Hat Summit conference in San Diego this week unveiled several initiatives, including a client product for small business users and plans to build a virtual appliance OS. A new client product, Red Hat Global Desktop, provides a mode

More on broadband banditry

Yesterday, I posted about six things that need to change. One of them was entitled "Broadband Bandits", where I basically denounced broadband companies' artificially limited bandwidth options. After re-reading it, I think I need to cla

Test Center Tracker: Longhorn 3’s got beef

A meaty OS serving: InfoWorld Chief Technologist has sliced into Beta 3 of Microsoft's long-awaited Longhorn and found plenty to chew on. Major advances center on PowerScript, Microsoft's .Net command-line shell, which is accompanied by uti

Red Hat’s opportunity (Jason Maynard of Credit Suisse)

I must have been channeling Jason Maynard when I wrote this yesterday about Red Hat's opportunity with RHN and RHX. Jason Maynard of Credit Suisse (yes, the same Maynard that called for Messman's head at Novell and had it handed to him on a

Spring gets batch processing

Developers of the Spring Framework for Java application development have partnered with Accenture to build Spring Batch, providing for batch processing in the Java realm. Many enterprise customers have a requirement for batch processing and Java hist

Intel secrets revealed!

The weird thing is, Intel let it all hang out voluntarily. Its frank disclosure of the ins and outs of its own IT operations is a model for others to follow

Nexo offers quick and easy collaboration

Any group, anywhere can take advantage of this service for creating simple group sites replete with handy little Web applications

JavaOne in SF

After a bit of a palaver trying to get Travis' press badge for JavaOne we finally made our way down to the floor to dig the scene. Initially it felt like any other trade show–a bit vast and mildly depressing. Then suddenly the sessions let out

Gartner Says Virtualization will Top IT Agenda Until 2010

According to Gartner, virtualization will be the most important technology in IT infrastructures and operations up to 2010, dramatically changing how IT departments manage, buy, deploy, plan and charge for their services. Gartner vice president and a

Vista Reboot Madness!

It's madness, I tell ya! Shear madness! Recently, I installed one of the myriad nVidia display drivers for Windows Vista (rev. 158.24 to be exact) and within 24 hours the operating systems was forcibly "downgrading" my XPS M1710 notebo

VMware Offers First Commercial Product to Support Paravirt-Ops

VMware, Inc. today announced the general availability of its latest Workstation product, version 6.0. Along with that announcement, the company also announced that it was supporting cross-platform paravirtualization with the open-interface standard p

VMware Releases Much Anticipated Workstation 6.0 Product

VMware, Inc. announced today the release of its industry-leading desktop virtualization product, VMware Workstation 6.0. The product operates on top of a wide range of host operating systems that include various Linux distributions and Windows versio

Red Hat: Growing its influence through RHX and RHN

First off, in today's executive press roundtable Matthew Szulik noted that Red Hat now signs up 10-15,000 new customers every 90 days. That's a shockingly large number, especially when you consider how many of its major customers it loses.

Web Services and Federated Identity

Sorry for the late blogging, I've been at the 2007 Web Services Security Conference and Exposition held near Baltimore MD. I did the keynote presentation at 9:00 AM on identity management strategy. Also, the panel at 1:00 PM also on identity man

Who will sue you?

I'm sitting in Stacie LeGrow's session on open source compliance. It's interesting to hear this topic from Red Hat's perspective, given that you'd think that Red Hat would have every incentive to let open source spread withou

Six things that need to change

Although I'm generally able to see both sides of an argument, there exists a short list of issues that I just can't comprehend. These are those issues. 1) The RIAA's war on its customers This one has been going on so long as to almost

Red Hat Summit: Press Conference w/ Matthew Szulik and Brian Stevens

I'm trying to capture glimpses of Matthew's and Brian's statements in this morning's press conference (mostly Matthew speaking). I'm paraphrasing in some cases, so any inaccuracies are my own. On Ubuntu (question asked by Ash

Overheard at the Red Hat Summit

I just flew in for Red Hat Summit (as press and as a partner through RHX), and immediately overheard something of interest from Paul Cormier, EVP of Engineering, Red Hat:Interoperability done in a back room with closed APIs is not interoperability…

JavaFX 101

Is it a case of being in tune with the zeitgeist, or of great minds thinking alike? For whatever reason, Microsoft's announcement of Silverlight last week at MIX07 was followed by Sun's announcement of JavaFX this week at JavaOne. So, what

Making the move to Linux tutorial

Will at MaximumPC did a good job explaining how to get Ubuntu up and running. The only downside is you still need to use the command line…which will definitely freak some people out. Let's see if the Ubuntu community can write some nice GUI ap

Microsoft and the age of insecurity

It seems like only yesterday that Bill Gates was touting Windows Vista as "dramatically more secure than any other operating system released" and claiming that security researchers would be lucky to find one Vista flaw in a month. Yet, only