Opinion

The luck of the virus

There's a reason you need intrusion detection systems

Sun goes down, Empire blows up

Methane and romance

Raise the bar, or go to one?

Dear Bob … I'm coming into a new situation from the outside. How can I shift the status quo from acceptable (marginal) to superior? My customer (not internal, a real customer) is "satisfied" with the level of servic

Where to practice a practice

Dear Bob … Just read your Advice column on "Practice vs Process" and found it really struck a chord with me. For some time now I have been aware of the industry trend toward commoditizing software development (see ASP.NET, Java and offsho

HPC, OS X, Gotos considered non-harmful

Many thanks to Gaurav Khanna for compiling his HPC on OS X site. I'm currently in the middle of performance testing the latest crop of commodity 64-bit processors, and this site was of great help in the OS X LINPACK tests. I've also been co

Product Previews, 8/16/2004

SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, Indicative 6.0, Metastorm e-Work 6.5, Winchester Systems SC-4400 FlashDisk

Writing a book

Everyone: A reminder – if you don't like the topics covered here in Advice Line, there's a simple solution. Send me a question! It's easy – just e-mail it to Advice@ISSurvivor.com.   Dear Bob … I'd like to write a book,

Verizon’s advanced outsourcing solution

Company’s iobi provides VoIP apps as services

Voice plus data equals innovation

Voice and data applications running on VoIP systems may provide the most compelling reason to put voice on an enterprise network

Aliens evaded, OneNote inflated

Readers write to tell me I'm wrong

Linux: Rebel with a clue

InfoWorld's 'Microsoft guy' discovers that Linux has a home in a Windows-based shop

Riding the outsourcing tide

Contract manufacturing is as much about IT as it is about business model

A sophisticated storage palate

Western Digital serves up more Caviar — with a twist

Gazing into the crystal ball

What will get security products on the right track? Sometimes a little conversation helps sort out the future

SIP, the enabler

SIP lays the groundwork for VoIP interop

IT alligator tales

Urban legends run amok in the technology world

The rewards of open source

How Fedora, Red Hat’s free Linux distro, solicits innovation from the community

The unwelcome gift of Java

Sun's plan to make Java open source is likely to set a precedent for other vendors

Take a risk or play it safe?

Dear Bob … I've been offered an opportunity by my current employer. Or maybe I should say "opportunity." I'm not sure which it is. I'd be leading a large initiative. It's a team of 20, two years long, broken up into fo

Practice or process

Dear Bob … There appear to be two paradigms in the IT business. The first one emphasizes hiring and developing high performing employees (such as agile software development or General Electric). The second one values process more (such as

A new meaning for “hot site”

Dear Bob … I'm a worker bee who evolved into the technology person here at the medium-sized non-profit organization where I work. It's time to redo our webpage. It's a responsibility formerly entirely my own, but for this it

Are SOAs customer- or vendor-driven?

Despite the hype, service-oriented architectures are not ready for the fast lane

Showdown at the VM corral

Highly productive dynamic languages such as Perl lack the ironclad, managed environment of Java and .Net; someday the two will meet

Are you ready for the feds?

With an extensible framework, IT can meet regulatory compliance mandates years in the future as well as those looming just ahead

Phishing for your secrets

Once a crime aimed at individuals, phishing can hurt your enterprise

Broadcom bets on SATA RAID

The Broadcom-RAIDCore acquisition bears some tasty fruit in the BC4000 SATA RAID controller

Open source convention packs heavy hitters

Show highlights the promise of accelerated development and lower costs

Keeping data confidential

Prying eyes can cost companies big time, especially when medical records are exposed. These techniques for obscuring database records can help

Recouping the costs of regulations

Enterprises are spending a bundle on compliance. Is there any ROI other than avoiding trouble?

Following IT’s action

Technology’s next important frontier is simple solutions to increasingly complex problems 

The IP SAN waiting game

iSCSI, you SCSI — we all scream for iSCSI hardware

Product Previews, 8/9/2004

Some ROTten examples

Dear Bob … Your column, Be as ROTten as you like, was a good one. Let me tell you a story about valuing relationships. This story came from a man who served in the South Carolina House of Representatives. He saw some of his fellow Assembl

Epistemology

Dear Bob … I just finished reading your Keep the Joint Running article titled Coping With Realists. I have been doing a lot of thinking the past 24 hours about facts vs. opinion, and your article showed up at just the right time. It cause

Hue and Cry

In last week's edition of InfoWorld, I took a close look at four of the most prominent Linux desktop distributions specifically geared for enterprise adoption. While many folks live and breath Gentoo, Mandrake, Fedora, SuSE Pro 9.1, and so forth

Nocona pulls a fast one

Intel asks customers to put their faith in a stopgap architecture

Intel strikes back with Nocona

Fresh from the foundry, Intel's fast new 64-bit chip leaps ahead of previous 32-bit Xeons. But can it challenge Opteron?

A close look at Nocona

Various tweaks make Intel’s new EM64T-enabled Xeon a dazzling 32-bit performer, but the 64-bit stuff falls short

Half Xeon, half Linux

Technology changes quickly; so must magazines that cover it 

More about wanting to do something

Following up: Quite a few readers wrote to suggest that my advice to "Wanting to do something" – the former systems manager who had transferred to a different department and recently learned her old department had stopped backing up its ser

IE nixed, Mozilla fixed

Looking for love in all the wrong places

Linux and hardware still have trouble getting along

Older desktops fare well in tests, but newer equipment reveals compatibility shortcomings

Security education works

If you keep trying, teaching people how to detect and deal with malicious code really will pay off

Manageability is a must for Linux to succeed on the enterprise desktop

Vendors need to weave in centralized policy management

Taming the paper tiger

We’ve given up on the paperless office, but at least we can reduce paper costs

Investing in the Linux client

The Allied Irish Bank expects to see solid returns on an 8,000-system migration to Linux

I know laptops, and you, PDA, are no laptop

Even the newest PDAs simply aren't worth the time or investment for corporate users

In search of the bottom line

When it comes to the TCO for any operating environment, management costs take top billing

The business case for desktop Linux

It's come a long way, but is Linux on the desktop compelling enough to make the switch?

Bigger, smarter SANs

As networked storage solutions take on more of a multivendor shine, end-users stand to benefit