Opinion

Intel mislays its mail, ASUS batteries fail

Bad things happen when the elite delete

A Stray Gateway Lemon

Just like with cars, sometimes a computer will turn out to be a lemon. While computer manufacturers rarely handle that situation very well, the experience one reader is having right now with a bad Gateway eMachines desktop is deserving of special att

Sharepoint: Microsoft’s new operating system

I've been beating on the Sharepoint drum for nearly two years now, but this is the first time I've seen anyone outside the ECM industry think along the same lines. Sharepoint is very clearly the future of Microsoft. And, not coincidentally,

Event: OpSource SaaS Conference in Monterey, CA

I wrote a few weeks back about the importance of open source in designing SaaS applications and extending your enterprise outside the firewall with things like Salesforce.com. Tomorrow I am on a panel with Jacob from Sugar and several proprietary ven

XenSource Kicks-Off Global Seminar Series

XenSource announced a new global campaign titled "Simply Virtualize" which includes a webcast and a series of global events which the company is producing along with IBM and Intel. Are you interested in reducing IT capital expenditures and

VMware Virtualized Desktops and XenSource Global Virtualization Initiatives

VMware, today's leader in the industry standard virtualized desktop and server market, announced a public beta of ACE 2 Enterprise Edition and is once again setting its sites on the virtualized desktop market. ACE is a breakthrough product that

Why did Attorney General back off the HP case?

For the final word on the Hewlett-Packard pretexting case I spoke with Bob Ridge, a white collar criminal law attorney for the firm of Thorpe, Reed and Armstrong. The big question is why the California Attorney General reduced the charges to a misdem

Open Source Prescription: RHX

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CEOs urge feds for green-tech funding, support

Citing the all-important economic case for advancing green technology, TechNet today issued a challenge to Congress and the president to, among other things, invest more seed money in sustainable-energy initiatives and offer greater tax incentives t

You want to be in charge? Then you probably aren’t qualified.

<p>So, you think you want to be in charge. Be the bossman. Everyone comes to you to ask for permission to start new projects, buy new laptops, whatever. It comes through you. You are The Man. Or The Woman. Whichever.</p> <p>Congr

Who cares about the Novell/Microsoft patent deal?

Not their customers, apparently. Matthew Aslett got to talk with a joint Novell/Microsoft guinea pig (I mean, customer :-), HSBC, and the support for the IP indemnity is underwhelming, at best:It’s a nice to have. I don’t think it was a m

Red Hat Exchange: Red Hat asserts its role as the leader of the free (and open source) world

It's a very good day if you work for or with Red Hat. The company continues to fire on all cylinders, announcing its Red Hat Exchange (rhx), of which Alfresco is part, as well as significant expansion to its channel strategy. (See also Steve Sha

REVIEW: Gateway M685-E Desktop Replacement Notebook

I just oozed over the Gateway M255-E as our Favorite Value Notebook of 2006. But Gateway didn't stop with the M255-E. The company also sent us the M685-E very late in 2006 and we've been banging on it ever since. At first glance, this look

Today in SMB Tech; 3/14

* Want Linux? Tell Dell. Seems Dell is taking user requests about Linux seriously and querying users to see if it really is a viable move. If you want to let them know how you feel, take the survey here. (Source: InfoWorld) *Samsung boosts mobile pho

Test Center Tracker: Gateway notebook review, and arguments for open source

Gateway comes through again: He may have already swooned over Gateway's M255-E, but Oliver is liking most of what he sees from the Gateway M685-E notebook: a 17-inch behemoth that performed well over the months but could use a smidge more oomph

How to Handle Network Growing Pains

Ron Gorodetzky, co-founder of Revision3 and the Senior Systems Administrator at Digg, was a presenter at the Southern California Linux Expo 2007. His presentation entitled Admin++, what root never told you walks through his own personal experience he

C-level

Dear Bob …I've been reading your column for a while and really appreciate your columns. I&nbsp;need some of your valuable quidance.Can you list down 3-5 objectives for CIO, CFO and CEO?Thanks.- Goal-orientedDear Oriented …I can either li

Calendar Hell: DST, Outlook, and Windows Mobile

I thought that updating my computers for this year's&nbsp;extended daylight savings time would be easy. It was, all except for the one I actually use to&nbsp;track my calendar. That was a little squirrely. Because I use about seven diffe

Is “Mashware” the New Thing for SOA and Mashups?

I typically do product briefings over the phone, or via WebEx. However, for those select few technology companies who are based in DC, I try to find time to get out to them in person. This was the case with JackBe, an Ajax-oriented start-up that has

Krugle adds code search to CollabNet

Krugle is announcing on Wednesday a partnership with CollabNet to provide code search capabilities to developers on the CollabNet platform and CollabNet Subversion. Code search functionality will be made available on CollabNet customers' develop

Unraveling the Communications Server mystery

The Office in Office Communications Server provides a clue as to what the product's all about

Mac sense and nonsense

A Windows professional finds the Mac to be irresistible until she launches applications

Gartner yawns on open source Business Intelligence, but is it looking at the wrong market?

Gartner's Business Intelligence Summit kicked off today to (apparently) standing room only crowds. But apparently open source BI isn't what is packing them in, at least according to Conference Chair Bill Hostmann's opening address:Host

SWsoft Joins HP ProLiant Partner Program

SWsoft, maker of server automation and virtualization software, announced that they have joined the HP ProLiant Partner Program. Doing so brings together the award-winning Virtuozzo server virtualization software with HP ProLiant servers which both c

RingCube Technologies Scores $12 Million Investment

Mountain View, California-based RingCube announced that they have raised a $12 million Series B round of funding. "MojoPac is experiencing phenomenal growth month to month across multiple channels," said Shan Appajodu, CEO and Founder of Ri

Trigence Continues Growth with Former Softricity Employees

Trigence, a provider of application virtualization, has announced the appointment of two former Softricity employees within less than a month of each other. On February 14, 2007, the company announced that Janet Strackhouse joined the company's

The toothpaste is out of the tube

The Linux desktop market is growing… (WSJ)

It's about time. Today's WSJ has an article on the Linux desktop that could have been written five years ago. Same reasons for why companies would consider the Linux desktop (cost savings on single-purpose desktops, e.g.). Same cast of char

If you’re going to pirate software, pirate Microsoft

I wonder if this means that Microsoft is embracing Nick Carr's argument that non-paying users are valuable? At the Morgan Stanley Technology conference last week in San Francisco, Microsoft business group president Jeff Raikes commented on the b

Managing SOA Semantics Using Ontologies and Supporting W3C Standards….”Web 3.0?” Free Webinar

Just a reminder that I'm giving a free Webinar on: Friday, March 16, 2007 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EDT You can register here. When dealing with SOA, as you know by now, we are dealing with much complexity. The notion of ontologies and semantics helps

Novell the gateway to Linux in public schools?

While Red Hat may be the key to Linux in emerging markets (through the One Laptop Per Child project), Novell continues to push Linux in the Education market, especially in EMEA and North America. Successfully, more often than not, given Novell's

Today in SMB Tech

* Microsoft gets closer to Dynamics. Get set for a load of SMB (with an emphasis on 'medium-sized') announcements from Microsoft regarding its Dynamics line. Products a'comin, Office 2007 integration, and user communities, too. (Source

The importance of documentation

Dear Bob …A comment about the posting about project estimation ("Problems with project estimation," Advice Line, 2/5/2007): You avoided the question about documentation.The stakeholders (as opposed to us pizza holders) will scream if the

ZapThink and I Talk about the Federal Enterprise Architecture and SOA

Download file…

Recipe for disaster

Technology can help prevent food contamination — but only if IT gets involved

How ‘the suits’ destroyed a billion-dollar company

They looked good in their Armanis, but their mishandling of the business wasn't a pretty sight

The Business Case for Open Source Software

With all the hype regarding Open Source Software (OSS), we sometimes forget logic in the excitement of trying to get on board with this latest trend. What we really care about (or should care about) is making a sound business decision regarding soft

Spotting the Good, and Bad, SOA Technology Vendors

As I'm working SOA projects these days I'm exposed to a number of SOA vendors…big, small, niche, and stack players. While doing this work I'm beginning to recognize some emerging patterns in spotting SOA vendor capabilities. Some of

Where’s Waldo? Locating the OID you need.

A few days ago I decided to write a little Cisco-centric SNMP query/modify tool. I didn't need or want anything beyond simply finding the switch and switchport a MAC or IP address was plugged into, and to be able to set that port to another VLAN

MySQL Conference & Expo – Heavy on customers, light on fluff

Want to know where the US Navy, Flickr, United Online, NASA, Facebook, Ticketmaster, Google, and others are going to be hanging out April 23-26 in Santa Clara, CA? The MySQL Conference & Expo. I'm not normally one for conferences (which soun

BMC gets open source religion

Will Hurley, formerly at Qlusters, has just joined BMC to head up its open source group. From the press release:Hurley is responsible for creating BMC’s open source agenda and overseeing the company’s participation in various free and ope

Fallen Brother

At PASS last fall I had the opportunity to meet one of the Apress editors, James Huddleston. I spent quite a bit of time talking to him about a number of topics and we even kicked around some book ideas. I was really looking forward to working with h

Call for Stupid User Tricks

Yep, we're hitting this topic again this year. I've already got a sizeable chunk of these reserved, but I wanted to open the door for more reader input like we had last year. The call is the same: send me your anecdotes with as much persona

An Overlooked Alternative: Virtual Server 2005

With the launch of Virtual PC 2007 Microsoft made it clear they have no intention of competing in the desktop virtualization market. The product's lackluster performance and limited feature set will no doubt drive the remaining hangers-on firmly

REVIEW: Iomega StorCenter Pro 150d

Okay, I just spent a few days dissing my Iomega 500GB StorCenter shared network hard disk because it suddenly started flaking on me after about 8 months of use. That didn't daunt Iomega, however, which sought to reclaim my mindshare by getting

Seagate’s Full Disk Encryption (FDE) hard drive

I remember this announcement back in 2005, when Seagate first announced that they would release a hard drive with full disk encryption (FDE). Well, they now have the Momentus FDE line of notebook drives (5400RPM) with 192-bit Triple-DES encryption, a

Spam – it isn’t just for e-mail anymore

The curse of spam comments has started to infest Advice Line. At a rough estimate I have to wade through and delete at least a hundred of these each week. It is, to say the least, a huge annoyance.Since more arrive Monday morning than at any other ti

Free Lessons for Beginning .NET Programmers

When the free Express editions of Visual Studio were first announced, the Microsoft .NET Development Series got quite a few proposals for books aimed at amateur and novice programmers. As Series Editor, I always had to ask how much money someone woul

XenSource and XenEnterprise 3.2 Beta

It looks as though XenSource has announced a beta availability of XenEnterprise 3.2. Roger Klorese, Senior Director of Product and Solutions Marketing at XenSource, announced on his blog site that in spite of a minor revision change, this product upd