Opinion

Funding News: Vyatta raises $11m from Comcast

Maybe I shouldn't complain about my outrageous cable bill now that Comcast is investing in open source companies? Pretty interesting to see corporate behemoths investing in OSS technologies that help run their business. Link: Comcast money helps

The Mobile Prize

It turns out all those rumors about the Google Phone were off by one consonant. The much-anticipated G-phone is actually an LG-Phone. Rather than build its own handsets (molecules — how 20th century) the Googletarians are teaming up with Korean elec

Complex event processing in a nutshell

Corel8 Engine, reviewed today by James R. Borck, is the fifth complex event processing solution to meet our test bench, after AptSoft Director, iSpheres Event Server (now Avaya Event Processor), Progress Apama, and StreamBase. For a quick and clean e

Coral8 update: Release 4.8

As we were putting the review of Coral8 Engine 4.6 to bed on Friday, Coral8's director of product marketing, John Morrell, sent us news of version 4.8, which is now available for download. Some of the new enhancements: * General availability of

Test Center Tracker: Complex event processing review; print’s last dance

Fresh from the Test Center: Agilty, speed, flexiblity… those seem to be the buzzwords du jour when it comes to building enterprise architecture. The goal is a system that can take in real-time data and analyze it for certain events – events that co

Ubiquitous Computing and SOA

 SOA and wearable computing? While a bit of a leap, this has me thinking more about wearable computing. I mean, we have the technology to place a small screen on my glasses as well, perhaps put a keyboard on my arm and all connected thro

Subversion

As I mentioned last Monday, I have been working with PC Pitstop on a regular basis again since last summer. Way back in 1999, Dave Methvin and I set up the PC Pitstop development effort as a completely virtual company: we had manage

Virtuozzo Gets the Nod from IBM to Run DB2 9

SWsoft plans to announce today that Virtuozzo's operating system server virtualization software has passed IBM's high standards of testing and validation for DB2 9 and has achieved "Ready for IBM DB2 data server software" status.

SMB Tech News Today; 4/2

* April Fools jokes from Google. Something about a free print-and-deliver service for GMail and a hi-speed Internet service being offered through your toilet, called Dark Porcelain. Hee hee. Ha ha. Couple more hee-hee's from Phonescoop (Samsung&

Rethinking business intelligence

BI has a reputation for being a resource sink that delivers reports almost no one reads. It doesn’t have to be that way. And you can no longer afford to let it be

A farewell to ink

The publication of our final printed issue heralds a fresh start online

GPL v3: V for vindication

Recent events underscore the Free Software Foundation's foresight in drafting the new license

The Opt-Out Constitution

It seems to have escaped much notice, but a modernized version of the U.S. Constitution is about to be enacted. In keeping with the way Americans in the Internet era deal with the various large institutions in our lives, the idea is to simplify the r

Best April Fools post: Ballmer joins Linux Foundation board

Ballmer was ecstatic about his appointment. "For a long time, Microsoft has supported the free and open source movement. I mean, come on, if we hadn't been putting out such crap in the marketplace, how do you think you Linux guys would have

Google Apps for Enterprise missing full-time SSL?

Having mostly recovered from our MuleCon event last week I looked at my to-do list and found that I had to be the one to setup the Google Apps Premier. After some minor difficulties (several "page not found" errors when adding accounts) I t

Here is the Presentation and Audio from my Enterprise Architecture Conference Keynote

The Changing Nature of Enterprise Architecture The Presentation Download file The audio Download file…

VMware Workstation 6.0 Reaches Release Candidate Stage

VMware has announced that VMware Workstation (build 42757) 6.0 has finally achieved Release Candidate stage. The good news for those of you testing the product – now that it is no longer in beta, the forced debug logging has been turned off and you s

News About Microsoft SoftGrid Including Vista Support

Very reminiscent to the period of time between when Microsoft acquired virtualization IP from Connectix Corporation and the eventual release of Microsoft Virtual Server, there has been very little news in the way of SoftGrid, the application virtuali

Intel’s Penryn Processor Family Boosts Virtualization Performance

Intel recently announced the details of the company's forthcoming family of processors, codenamed Penryn, which is slated for release in the second half of this year. These new processors benefit from enhancements to the Intel Core microarchitec

Veeam Software Updates Reporter to 1.5

Less than a month after announcing the release of their 1.0 version of Reporter, Russian based software provider, Veeam Software, has already updated their product based on feedback received from customers. The product is a reporting tool used to dis

Microsoft Announced SCVMM Beta 2 Features

At this year's Microsoft Management Summit 2007, Microsoft announced the beta 2 release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and said the product should be released sometime around the Microsoft WinHEC 2007 conference. For IT profess

Great SOA Video…SOA ROI

Let’s call Gates’ bluff on H-1Bs

The H-1B news out of Washington this week as reported on InfoWorld's site, is that the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Service (USCIS) expects application for the 65,000 H-1Bs available to be filled in days this year instead of weeks or months as i

Top 5 WAN accelerators

If you missed today's chat with Silver Peak Systems CEO Rick Tinsley, you can find a transcript of the discussion here . If you didn't miss it, and you're looking for the links to the reviews I promised, here they are: Riverbed Steelhe

A Tale of Two Workstations

When it rains, it pours. I've been absolutely slammed with work lately, between the Asterisk piece that printed a few weeks ago, going in-depth with Sun's x4500 Thumper storage server and ZFS, a large-scale NAS filer test that is just abou

Darth Vader, meet Dr. Evil

The Wall Street Journal said it, so it must be true. Microsoft is apparently mulling plans to buy DoubleClick. I don't know about you, but the idea of the Redmond Reprobates delivering ads across the Net sends a chill down my spine. Will a compa

Can you trust vendor sponsored information?

Imagine if you read a feature story in the Sunday magazine edition of your favorite paper on, say nuclear power plants, and at the top it had the usual byline of your favorite reporter but at the bottom it said something like, "this article was

Rebates For Better or Worse

While most Gripe Line readers seem to share my dislike of rebates, there are those who actually seem to enjoy chasing down their wayward rebate checks. Even when they do encounter a deadbeat rebate, such readers always seem to find a silver lining. &

Novell dissolves its Linux Impact Team

Novell this week dissolved its Linux Impact Team (LIT), headed by Nancy Faigen, and rolled the members of LIT into the regional sales teams. While disruptive to the individuals involved (and the LIT had some of Novell's very best employees – Joh

Virtual Hair Splitting

I received some feedback recently over my coverage of Parallels Workstation for Windows 2.2 (see the Test Center review). Specifically, I was criticized for describing Parallels as a "hypervisor-based" solution, a term echoed by the company

Oracle customers are talking, but what are they saying? (CNET)

Stephen Shankland of CNET has interesting commentary on Oracle's recent Linux customer press release. In that release Oracle trots out 26 customers that are buying into Oracle Unbreakable Linux. Or are they? As Stephen suggests, the press releas

Two chicks in every pot

It's the digital equivalent of kissing babies and shaking hands; candidates for national office now have to prove they're "down with the kids" by having their own YouTube clips and MySpace pages. It's also true that most if n

Google too powerful? (BusinessWeek)

BusinessWeek has a great cover story this week on the rise and apparent omnipotence of Google. Lately, Microsoft has been looking very fallible, forcing us to look around for a new company to demonize. Google has assumed that mantle. BW did an intere

PR in Second Life? Are they kidding?

To get the screen shot of the IBM CODESTATION area in Second Life that I showed you on Wednesday, I had to register for Second Life, download the client, log in, and flail around for awhile until something worked well enough for me to get where I was

SMB Tech News Today; 3/30

* 5 Coolest Gadgets from CTIA. In video form. Includes a couple of cool new cell phones from Pantech and Samsung, a new media player and more. (Source: NetworkWorld) * ICANN shoots down .XXX again. The concept of a separate porno domain has been floa

Welcome to Cringeville

Greetings from the land of ink-stained wretches. After much arm twisting, cajoling, pleading, and whining, I've finally convinced my editor to let loose the reins and give me my own blog here on Infoworld.com. The world may never be the same. No

SOA Vendors Need to go to SOA School

I ran across Joe McKendrick's blog post reporting on a fact that I've raised several times…SOA vendors don't understand SOA, and it's frustrating end users. "ZDNet's Steven Deare reports that the IT h

Should you trim your file servers?

Moving seldom-used files away from prime storage can save big on management and upgrade costs

Security odds and ends

In like a lion, out like a lamb: Roger wraps up March with paint-on wireless security, new SANS certification programs, and a reading list

Nearly Half of Virtualization Projects are Unsuccessful

Nearly half of global virtualization projects are unsuccessful, this according to an independent global study which surveyed 800 organizations from around the world. The study, commissioned by Computer Associates, found that 44 percent of respondents

SWsoft – Teaming with Novell and Apple

SWsoft is reaching out across the virtualization community. First, the company has been spotted teaming up with Novell to bundle in their Virtuozzo operating system virtualization solution into SUSE Linux Enterprise 10. And then second, rumor has it

GPLv3 goes weak on protecting freedom (ASP loophole resurrected)

I completely missed this on my quick read-through of GPLv3 (Draft 3) yesterday. The FSF, as Fabrizio rightly declares, completely neutered the GPL for the 21st Century of software. (Note to the FSF: Never upset an Italian. It's not pretty.)That

Warning: Companies may be less green than they appear

As issues of energy savings and waste reduction float to the forefront of IT leaders' minds, a "greener than thou" attitude is starting to permeate the industry — but the short-term bottom line still seems to take precedence. Last wee

Apple tries to save recording industry, but who will save enterprise software industry?

With CD sales tanking as more and more music lovers buy just the songs from the album that they like, Apple iTunes is set to offer a plan to boost album sales. Apple will try to help the recording industry by offering iTune users a discount on any fu

Red Hat rolls on (Analysis from its Q4 earnings call)

Red Hat continues its bullish run, but a bit less profitably than previous quarters, as reported by Forbes and other sources. Red Hat nailed $400M in FY 2007 revenue, up 48% over the previous year. Sales were up 41% over Q3, but profit in Q4 decrease

Great email is an important career skill

<p>Ok, so the reports and documents I write in Word and submit to my management are important, I get that. But not email. That's different, right?</p> <p><em>Nope, that too, and this does mean you.</em> This arti

Time-based release methodologies and open source communities

Martin Michlmayr has just finished his doctoral dissertation at the University of Cambridge, and has posted it online. I've reported on some of Martin's other work before, and think it's fascinating. (Btw, if you don't want to plo

Test Center Tracker: Adobe Apollo had landed

A galaxy of mashup opportunity: Developers eager to delve into the world of application mashups would be well-served by checking out the alpha version of Adobe's new Apollo IDE. Contributing Editor James R. Borck had a chance to dabble with inno

Hands on: Sun shines on Adobe Apollo

Adobe last week launched the alpha SDK of its Apollo runtime engine, a developing framework that boasts the hallmark cross-platform deployment capabilities availed through Flash, yet its slant toward widely adopted standards opens the door for develo

SMB Tech News Today; 3/29

* Yahoo's really upping the email ante. Yesterday it said it intended to offer unlimited email storage by May. Now Yahoo says it's opening its email API to outside developers. That means third-party Web 2.0 collab apps on an email client wi