Opinion

Acrobat challenges InfoPath

Adobe takes a giant step forward into direct competition with Microsoft

Apple’s G5: More than a pretty face

This machine may bring home the superiority of bandwidth over megahertz

Apple’s playing in the big leagues now

The company gets aggressive to pull in enterprise IT

Riding the vendor gift horse

When big technology changes are coming, it's not always bad news

A la mode: Key Apple add-ons

Hardware and software options from Apple and third parties

The trials of Jobs

Apple's irrepressible leader tackles his next challenge: converting IT

Public Wi-Fi in a death spiral

Users will trade incremental performance increase for everywhere access

HP terminates, IBM spins down

Thimk!

Random musings … "I'm too busy." Okay, fair enough. Executives are busy people both by nature and by profession. A lot of the job is communication, which means a lot of it is spent in meetings. That leaves less time to focus on doing

A gamey exchange

Dear Bob, You charactarize one's career competition with peers and corpoprate competition in the marketplace as a game, and rightfully so. But it is appropriate to differentiate it as a major-league game rather than a casual pick-up match at the

Who are these people?

I am simply amazed that 1) Someone thought this would work. 2) They're probably right. Ads are one thing, pure fraud is quite another. The original email was base64 encoded HTML, with the form post calling http://secure.fethard.biz/clients/login

Project over head, or just project overhead?

Dear Bob … My employer is outsourced to a consortium that employs the Catalyst methodology. Would you explain to me how this much overhead can be good for a small (under $40k) project? Or is it possibly being applied incorrectly? I am ver

Don’t you go changing

Woke up the other day to find my Net connection was down. A look at flanders told me that the link was up on the cable modem, but no data. Seems that they reallocated IP space to my segment. We went from 24.25.132.0/22 to 68.172.16.0/22. Of course, t

Two heads are better than one

For all those curious about the FedEx/Sun monitor debacle, FedEx picked up the broken Sun and told the seller that they were accepting the damage claim. The seller returned my money. Two days later, FedEx denied the claim. I had a monitor shop look a

SCO suit or no suit?

Dear Bob … I have a question that I'm sure other IT folks are encountering. What can I tell non-technical managers to convince them that a move to Linux is not doomed in license fee hell with SCO's claims and lawsuits. We were ready to r

Small business, big enterprise: Sometimes size really doesn’t matter

If you have a small or midsize business, you still must look to enterprise security solutions for guidance

Watching out for MOM

Some big changes are on the horizon for Microsoft Operations Manager

Small storage vendors, hold on to that niche

Find a sheltered market segment for your products and services

The hidden cost of hardware

What you don't know about licenses for the software that powers your machines could come back to haunt you

Affordable firewalls

We test whether firewall appliances can really do the job

SCO strikes gold, Verizon just strikes

Paranoia runs deep

Modeling human behavior: Insight won’t compute

Latent Statistical Analysis offers a glimpse into both the possibilities and limits of computers

Picking a process platform

Shared services can cut down on redundancies and give a clear view of where your company stands

XML namespaces and training wheels

It would help to have tools to avoid creating problems for downstream applications

Sometimes you get the boor, sometimes the boor gets you

Bob … This comment is too boorish and insensitive to ignore: "You and your colleagues would be out of work, which would be mighty inconvenient, I'm sure." Spoken like a true consultant – a con-artist for whom nothing is important an

Yet another project, yet another problem

Dear Bob … I'm part of a large team that's been working on a long project. How long? It was originally scheduled as a two-year project, it just passed its three-year anniversary, and there's no end in sight. The project has been re-l

Whither Ximian?

Could we be looking at a full desktop and server Linux distribution from Novell in the near future? Definitely interesting.

Wireless security: Harder than you think

Adding encryption to wireless networking isn't always simple

Microsoft imperialism could benefit storage

Redmond's Virtual Disk Service may spur innovation from competitors

Can we blame only storage vendors?

OS vendors should do a better job at following storage evolution

Revisiting Zope

An unorthodox approach holds promise for enterprise content management

Test before you leap into development

Take a test-driven approach, and your engineers will better design software and engage in risk-free refactoring

Application vendors ponder a port

Software vendors are eyeing the 64-bit Linux market, but show no signs of jumping in

Will Linux kill the proprietary server?

Tightly coupled hardware/software designs and lockstep evolution give classic 64-bit beasts the edge

The next wave: 64-bit Linux

Your choice of software may determine your hardware performance

Computational clusters today, server rooms tomorrow

Low-cost software and hardware make Linux ideal high-performance computing tasks

Mobile access for the masses

Inexpensive cell phones will soon have the same capabilities as the high-priced models

Vendors can’t afford to wait

Strategies hatched too late won't fly in today's market

Unit testing for Java and .Net made simple and free

JUnit and NUnit  handle the dirty work of creating and executing unit tests

Vendor blues

Dear Bob … Great column on Customer Elimination Management, Bob. Now, how to get the message to the CAs and Veritases of the world? Better yet, how to get it to some of the hardware vendors who have recently opted to outsource first-line

The Art of Migration

There are days that things just work the way they're supposed to. I really like those days. The task was to migrate four RedHat 7.1-7.3 servers to new hardware and RedHat 9. The servers performed myriad tasks including: DHCP Services DNS Service

It’s a game.

Musings … It doesn't matter. What doesn't matter? What you do, that's what, and what your company does. This isn't always true, of course. If you work in a hospital you're dealing with life-and-death situations and

More gender bias

Hello Bob, I am another female who find herself in a similar position to "Bipolar," although I'm not the CIO, just an IT Operations/Security Manager. And I wonder, as she does, if gender plays a role in the situation; you did not real

Another project from hell

Bob, I'm a staff level IT employee at a large regional company where even the most mundane things can, and usually do, become heavily politicized. In particular, there is outright animosity between IT and most of the business lines, st

The whipping boy

I was reading Jon Udell's post on OS X and sendmail, and emailed him to chat about what I believe to be sendmail's bad rap. His reply I don't dis sendmail, I just avoid having to learn it. Programming in an environment as obscure as th

Dancing with WORMs

Computer Associates and Sony demo backup solutions on non-rewritable tapes at CA World

Technology doesn’t have all the security answers

Despite today's impressive tech capabilities, you can't solve every problem

Microsoft goes to the dogs

Accenture in a buying mood?

IBM’s new fab is absolutely fabulous

Fishkill, the hottest little town in America

The future of XML documents and relational databases

As new species of XML documents are emerging, vendors are unveiling increased RDBMS support for XML