Opinion

Morrissey, milk, and changing generations

My wife, eldest daughter, and I went to see Morrissey in concert last night in Salt Lake City. Morrissey actually answered one of my pleas, singing one of my favorite songs from his early days with The Smiths:Haven't had a dream in a long time/

Test Center Tracker: Pondering UIs and mobile Java

More from JavaOne: Martin Heller is wondering if the new JavaFX platform is related to the old Java ME, "which was going to extend the Java platform down to PDAs and cell phones." Is there anything new in the JavaFX announcement? Post your

A six-stupid interchange

Dear Bob …I'm not fully convinced your description ("Six Stupid process controls," Keep the Joint Running, 4/30/2007) is exactly the situation, nor the usual root cause. Stuff like six stupid does happen as part of the bigger foul up

Black Duck checks code

Black Duck Software is announcing transactIP, a hosted solution to evaluate the integrity of software code before the software is purchased. Built on top of Black Duck's protexIP platform for managing software code requirements, transactIP addre

The ultimate user interface

Be among the few who are savvy enough to put this revolutionary cross-platform UI to use After more than two decades of searching, I've finally come up with my million-dollar idea. It's the ultimate in user interface technology. It is genui

The Road to Longhorn: A Hobbit’s Tale

The path to Longhorn Beta 3 has been long and winding, but the adventure is just beginning

SAP gives new meaning to closed platforms

SAP's never-ending product development cycle (~3 years at $1 billion) for their new product has resulted in a hosted system built on top of Netweaver. The amazing part is they have created a system designed specifically to not be open to develop

Ye Olde Carpal Tunnel

Being that Matt is the most prolific person I know most of our readers don't care that I am not posting much. Much of reluctance has been because of a hand/wrist pain that makes it hard to type. My 2 months of excruciating pain turns out to be c

Sun Microsystems and IBM Each Exploring New Technology

Sun Microsystems is exploring new technology that it created from its virtualization endeavors. The project, called Live* (Live Star), could prove to be a new software and security delivery model. And after that, IBM and Transitive Technology team up

SAP draws a line in the sands of the Middle East

We all know that much of Asia is booming — manufacturing, outsourcing, and, I suppose, capitalism in general is reinvigorating many economies and, it is to be hoped, raising the standard of living of its populations. See my Reality Check blog, The T

Interchangeable Web 2.0 – Too much web in common

I was going to post on this article in today's WSJ, but Paul beat me to it. The WSJ doesn't call out the underlying problem, but points to a surface problem in today's web companies…at least, for the VCs that invest in them. Namely,

No spies on us

Hewlett Packard's corporate spy ring may have skated with a wrist slap (and a $14.5 million fine) from the California Attorney General's office, but HP isn't out of the woods yet. A troika of CNET reporters are suing the pugnacious pre

Look who is coming to OSBC

I just went through the attendee list for the Open Source Business Conference and loved what I saw. For the first time, OSBC is truly drawing a deep bench of IT buyers. It's something that we have strived for since the first show (well, the seco

Test Center Tracker: Java, Java everywhere

JavaOne 2007: If you feel a buzz from Java like you get from your morning coffee, check out our ongoing coverage of JavaOne 2007. Among other stories from the show, Sun has said it will work with the open-source community to rewrite "encumbered&

Open source investments continue to flow (Larry Augustin)

In his annual post (sorry, Larry – couldn't help myself :-), Larry has tracked open source venture investments and posted the results: over $1B in open source investments in the last three years alone. If we add in investments prior to 2004 (whi

Hey, buddy – can you spare a dime (for an open source developer)?

Sun is proposing that companies find ways to pay open source developers for their work. What a novel concept! At the CommunityOne and NetBeansDay events in San Francisco on Monday, Rich Green, Sun executive vice president for software, expressed doub

Getting innovative with Linux and JBoss (The Innovation Awards)

Red Hat just announced the winners of its Innovation Awards, and the results show that Linux has a very bright future in the enterprise. I was fortunate to be one of the judges, and was/am impressed by the variety of interesting uses to which compani

Teaching a database to lie

What do numbers mean if we change them to say whatever we want them to say? At my previous job, I was given an interesting assignment — something quite different from my usual IT chores. My boss asked me to create a way to measure the performance le

Telcos to tap Web surfing

E.U. anti-terrorist directive adds Web browsing to the data retention list The European Union Directive 2006/24/EC will take data retention for telecommunications a step beyond where governments have ever gone before. I learned of this directive by w

Metastorm bolsters BPM

Metastorm announced the release this week of Version 7.5 of the company's Metastorm BPM (business process management) suite. The suite allows organizations to improve multiple business processes and supports rapid analysis and change across huma

SOA, the Good and the Bad

SOA, the Good and the Bad Download file…

A sales force challenge

Dear Bob …I'm in a 1,000+ employee company, focusing in Greater China. We're used to and still very much focused on product selling vs solution selling.I'm building a team focusing on Enterprise Content Management. We've earned

Why you should be blowing your own horn

<p>I've always heard you've got to blow your own horn, because no on else is going to blow it for you. For most of us, though, blowing our own horn is pretty hard to do. So what, exactly, are the benefits that go with the pain? And ho

Paid Verizon Bills Don’t Always Stay Paid

It's a good idea to check your monthly phone and Internet bills to make sure the vendor isn't running up too many gratuitous charges. This apparently goes double with Verizon, as two different readers have recently discovered that Verizon&#

The UK: Home of open source innovation?

No, I'm not talking about Alfresco, my employer. I think what we're doing is exceptionally cool, but two other companies from the "island of shopkeepers" are pushing the envelope on innovation. They're not just bringing open

Top Open Source Applications of All Time

Vista Compatibility

My oldest daughter just went through "a circle of Dante's hell" trying to get SPSS 15 to run on Windows Vista. Eventually, she was able to create a login on the SPSS site and download their recent Vista compatibility patch, which did w

Test Center Tracker: Going green can save you some green

Forecast for the week: greener, with a chance of green: Get your green on with the latest energy- and resource-saving tidbits. Ted Samson sat down with Sun's vice president of eco-responsibility to talk about sustainability on the eve of JavaOne

Canadians Falling Behind in SOA Adoption

According to this article in IT Business, a Canadian IT magazine, while Canada leads in many areas, SOA is not one of them. "The concept may be hot, but the adoption rate is not, according to a Canadian IDC analyst." While SOA moving steadi

OSS injects greenery into highly modular Gemini servers

Wouldn't it be nice to live in a truly plug-and-play world, where, for example, you could quickly and easily pull out the old gas-guzzling engine in your otherwise-functional automobile and swap in a hybrid engine you bought off the shelf at the

Five predictions for 2007

I've decided to go into the futurist business. It's where all the money is. And if you turn out to be wrong, there's a chance your clients will die before they find out. So I consulted The Oracle (no, not that Oracle), gazed into my Ma

Figureheads can hurt you

Stupid user trick No. 3: MBA? Check. Tech Chops? Not so much …

Poor purchasing oversight

Stupid user trick No. 1: Wherein "overnight" means overnight

Don’t bail on e-mail

Stupid user trick No. 6: Caught in an undeliverable trap

Porn filters: Use ’em

Stupid user trick No. 10: Turn it on, or put your company in a compromising position

Yet another cleaning lady story

Stupid user trick No. 2: Server room. Windex. Zot

A truck load of Murphy

Stupid user trick No. 7: Revamp that vanity app

One plan to rule them all

Stupid user trick No. 9: Library, laboratory; same difference

SugarCRM: Open source on the fast track

Back in 2004, the idea of an enterprise application based on open source code was off the wall. Today, SugarCRM is a striking example of what community-based development and viral marketing can do

Locked datacenter?! Well, let me get that for you

Stupid user trick No. 4: Key management 101

Green is great unless it’s due to nausea

Stupid user trick No. 5: Wipe, recycle, repeat

Cruel and unusual

Stupid user trick No. 8: Disrespectful dismissals make for clean slates

The return of stupid user tricks

Tales of ineptitude, stories of the coming week, and tech startups share the spotlight

Comcast Picks Zimbra to Launch the Next Generation of Consumer Messaging

Zimbra is set to announce an important strategic partnership with Comcast, providing email, visual voice mail and a unified customer experience as part of the new Comcast SmartZone. The service will take advantage of Zimbra's already very slick

Interviewing techniques

Dear Bob …What do you think about behavioral interviewing? That's where they ask you to tell a story about the time you led development of a new marketing strategy, instead of asking how you might do it in the future.I've always though be

“VMcasting” Specification Formed for Automatic VM Deployments

Virtualization and virtual appliance vendors, Enomaly Inc, virtualappliances.net, and JumpBox announced the creation of what they are calling the "VMcasting specification". They describe VMcasting as an automatic virtual machine deployment

Q&A Discussion about VMware’s Benchmarking Policy

One of the best ways to select which virtualization platform to choose for your environment is usually based on benchmark or performance findings. Unfortunately, many of us cannot perform these benchmark tests ourselves, for any number of reasons. An

INSYSTEK Promises Virtually Limitless Infrastructure Management

If you've ever questioned the scalability of your existing VMware management software, you might want to check out INSYSTEK which claims to offer a "virtually limitless" management solution. As the company tested the latest version of

BEA WebLogic Server and Java Virtualization

BEA Systems announced that it would start shipping its WebLogic Server Virtual Edition software at the beginning of June. The company also stated that it would follow that up with a release of WebLogic Liquid Operations Control in the third quarter o

One more reason to dislike bozos who own copyrights

Now I'm angry. The English Premier League (home of the divine Arsenal) are threatening to sue YouTube over alleged infringement of its copyrights. t claims YouTube had consciously encouraged people to view content on its site in order to raise i