Opinion

Emerging Enterprise: DIY Dashboards and Evolutionary Notebook Stress

This week we talk about giving your boss a special holiday gift: a do-it-yourself ultra-custom business dashboard. After that we talk about all the hoopla surrounding the evolution of the notebook and how to make sense of it all for the SMB set.&

Moron voting machines

Holy cow! as Harry Carey used to say. My last post – about voting machines ("A post-election rant,"Advice Line, 11/8/2006), that asked how it's possible that such a simple problem has been turned into such a collosal fiasco – led to mo

IE7 rejected, YouTube misdirected

Guns don't kill people, browsers kill people

Sun needs to find some sizzle

Elegant, accessible products — for consumers and the enterprise — are needed for Sun to redefine itself

Password-cracking contest results

Are long, noncomplex passwords harder to crack than short, complex passwords? These results lean toward yes

Hands-on: Vista is ready. Are you?

I love it when Microsoft lays it on thick. Normally, we just get a DVD with a new OS installed. Not this time. This time, an HP DV9000 notebook showed up in my mailbox, pre-installed with Vista RTM, the latest build of Office 2007, and other sundries

A McAfee Marathon

All too often, getting support for a software product can turn into a grueling experience. In fact, just getting back to where you were before you bought the product can be a small triumph in itself, as one reader decided after a recent encounter wit

InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum…Day 2

More of the same on day 2 of the forum…great content. The best presentation of the day, I thought, was: "Leveraging SOA to Expand Customer Self Service and a Disbursed Mobile Workforce" by Carl Eberling, Vice President IT, CIO West Area,

Storage performance still matters

New solutions from NetApp, Panasas may fill midtier and HPC storage's need for speed

Office Live a smart move

Microsoft finally shows some Web 2.0 innovation with its Web-based app suite

Does Vista Kill Third-Party Disk Encryption?

I'm dinging away at a hands-on of the Vista RTM release, but figured I'd hit this topic now because I've had some reader inquiries. Vista has a new system accessory, a drive encryption utility, called BitLocker. It's not part of

Virtualizing DBs

Today Tom Yager wrote about going down the virtual rabbit hole. I'd like to go ahead and chime in because this is directly relevant to issues DBAs have to face every day. I'll just tell you a story of what happened to me a couple years ago.

Simula hosts open source projects

Simula Labs this week announced availability of a hosted distribution platform for complimentary open source technologies, with its Community-oriented Real-time (CoRE) Network. CoRE features a community marketplace that provides enterprises with a ro

A post-election rant

So here's what I wonder:I read recently that in the primaries, and during the absentee balloting that preceded the elections, touchscreen voting machines proved to have serious problems, frequently failing to properly record and tally votes. Ove

InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum…Day 1

Yesterday I did make it to the Summit at about 11:00, and sat in a few sessions before having to get on e-mail and this blog. The conference is well attended with over 900 people here, and to think they just got things going 8 weeks ago. The agenda i

Web apps, just give me the data

Too many Web apps present data passively, instead of providing real access to it

Down the virtual rabbit hole

Troubleshooting and getting maximum value from a virtual enterprise are not as simple as you think

How to Pick a Pack of Pickled POS Systems

Let's take a little break from the Vista/Office 2007 stuff. Still have a couple to go there, but I'll get to them. Just need something else before I OD on Windows. POS=Point of Sale. Means cash register. Which is why many SMB managers trea

Gripe Line Podcast

McAfee technical support puts one reader through a gauntlet.  Listen…

“Old School SOA” Still Making the Cut?

"Old School SOA" Still Making the Cut? Download file…

Handling interview challenges

Dear Bob …I had a phone interview with an HR screener a few months ago. She said: it's been a while since you've worked for a large company – I don't think you can do that any more. She went on to say that the five staff members have

Test Center Tracker: Security double standard for Sun, Microsoft?

Blinded by the light?: Ed Foster's got a good question: Does Sun get the same security scrutiny as other vendors (read: Microsoft) when it comes to Java security updates? According to one GripeLine reader, the various releases and retractions of

Cash crisis in the frozen north

I had only two choices: Get the ATM back on the network by 5 p.m. — or die

EuP: The coming regulation storm, Part 2

One expert warns EuP will require cross-enterprise information transfer, posing a big new IT challenge

Microsoft Takes Cue From VMware’s Virtual Appliances

Virtualization gives us the ability to encapsulate an entire server and compute power into a file or virtual hard disk. This instance is called a virtual machine, and VMware has taken that virtual machine up the food chain some time ago when it packa

SQL Server 2005 SP2 Nov CTP is HERE!!!

Well, SQL Server SP2 Nov CTP is being released today so I hope you’re all ready for it. The CTP will officially open up today at 3pm PST. You can get it here: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/ctp.mspx I’m really hoping this will add up to a s

Part 2: “Old School SOA” Still Not Making the Cut?

So, continuing from our discussion yesterday (okay today, but I'm traveling tomorrow)… how do you fix issues with "traditional integration" companies moving towards the SOA marketplace? Here are a few general notions….

Ace Your Review

This is another topic that's near to my heart as it effects our bank accounts. I'm talking about your yearly performance review. So many companies will make you fill out a self-eval and then your boss will add his comments. This gives you a

Part 1: “Old School SOA: Still Not Making the Cut?

Okay, this is for SOA technology companies, end users need not read further, unless you want to learn more about this side of the market….

XenSource Announced XenEnterprise for Windows and Linux

XenSource, Inc., the leader in infrastructure virtualization solutions based on the open source Xen hypervisor, today announced XenEnterprise for Windows and Linux, the market's first commercially-packaged Xen virtualization solution supporting

Building, exposing, and monitoring services

After you've chosen your platform and have begun building services, you'll need to allow others to discover them — and check their integrity in real time

Adopting an ESB — or not

Should services be wrapped into an ESB? Or should they be managed and mediated some other way? Proponents, detractors face off

SOA: Under construction

Enterprises are finding building SOAs slow going because of the many technologies’ dependencies. Here's what's happening on the ground

SOA on display

InfoWorld's "Mr. SOA" puts together a polished, practical show

Performance, security and run-time governance

When ESBs aren’t enough for your SOA, XML appliances fill in the gaps

Rebooting HTML for the Semantic Web

Seeking better standards compliance, the Web's creator faces an uphill battle

Test Center Tracker: Looking beyond Web 2.0

Weaving the Semantic Web: Contrary to urban legend, Al Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet — but credit for the World Wide Web properly goes to Tim Berners-Lee. Senior Editor Neil McCallister reports that Berners-Lee is recruiting assis

Sun Never Sets on Java Security Updates

When it comes to security, Sun tends to be subject to much less criticism than some other system software vendors we could mention. But one reader thinks that a little more scrutiny of Sun would be a good thing, particularly in terms of how it handle

Virtualization Report Goes to VMworld 2006

If news slows down a bit over the next few days, it is because I will be attending VMware's VMworld 2006 event in Los Angeles. The good news, I'm sure there will be plenty of news coming out of the show. I believe the anticipated amount of

Virtualization Report Talks with Kidaro’s CEO

Last week, the Virtualization Report broke the news about Kidaro's new product, Kidaro Managed Workspace. Since then, I have had the opportunity to speak with the company's founder and CEO, Ran Kohavi. I wanted to find out more about the co

VMware Multi-Core Pricing & Licensing Policy

As Intel and AMD continue to increase processing power by expanding out cores per processor, how will this affect VMware licensing? Good question. Effective November 1st of 2006, VMware redefined and explained its policy on how to define a processor

VMware Fusion for Mac Edges Closer

VMware's virtualization product for the Intel-based Mac, code-named Fusion, just got a little more real for a number of lucky people. VMware recently sent out an email invitation to a group of people fortunate enough to take part in a private be

Microsoft and Novell Announce Broad Collaboration on Windows and Linux Interoperability and Support

Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. announced a set of broad business and technical collaboration agreements to build, market and support a series of new solutions to make Novell and Microsoft products work better together. The two companies also announc

OpenVZ Available Now on Latest Linux Kernel

The OpenVZ project announced availability of its beta level software that is based on the Linux kernel – 2.6.18. The release will prepare users for the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5) and Debian GNU/Linux 4 releases. So what is OpenVZ? Qu

New Special Interest Group Focuses on Open Source Monitoring

Top five business rule management systems

In 2006, InfoWorld (more specifically rules wizard James Owen) evaluated five rule-based systems. Here's how they stack up, based on their overall scores in our reviews: #1. Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor 6.1 (Excellent, 8.7) #2. Corticon 4 and ILOG J

Emerging Enterprise: Generators and Small Biz Leasing

This episode we're talking about that one component to data centers that most guys seem to want to avoid: The generator. Then we talk about why more small businesses should think about leasing rather than just plunking down their hard-earned cas

Certeon to boost its WAN accelerators with Open XML support

If your enterprise is geographically distributed, and you run applications across your WAN, you'll find that the apps run slowly because of high latency, limited bandwidth, packet loss, and contention. Several vendors have addressed this problem

The SOA Methodology Refinement Continues…Step X: Understand all services available in your domain.

Okay, now I'm moving from understanding data/semantics, to understanding existing or legacy services. You can see the old work here. Services are very different. Some services are more behavior-oriented and some are more information-oriented, b

Oracle OpenWorld  makes a splash

Block party filled with good food, live penguins, and glimpses into potential new rivalries