- Don't encourage hands-free use of cell phones
- Unix servers made simple and affordable
- New iPhone spawns rampant rumors
- Daily News beat for April 29, 2008
- Preview: Sun's two-way eight-way
- On laptop abuses and follies
- HP aggravates its own failure rate
- IT control freaks
- Why users should manage their own PCs
- Another take on opening PCs
May 12, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Don't encourage hands-free use of cell phones
San Francisco just passed a law requiring hands-free use of mobile devices for drivers and InfoWorld's Ephraim Schwartz is ready to take shelter in a hummer as a result.
"Watching a driver blithely drive down the wrong way on a one-way street while said driver was also talking on the phone, leads me to believe people aren’t as multifunctional as they would like to believe," Schwartz writes in today's blog.
"The question is, I suppose, does this law make it safer to use a cell phone while driving, or will it encourage those who may have been reluctant to use a cell phone, to start using one, thus increasing the overall number of accidents caused by cell phone usage in a car?"
Let us know where you stand on this issue.
Posted by Caroline Craig on May 12, 2008 10:19 AM
May 06, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Unix servers made simple and affordable
What could inspire Tom Yager to give up his day, (night, and weekend) job at InfoWorld to enter the PC server business? No, that isn't a question in this week's News Quiz, it's from a review of Apple's latest Xserve, the eight-core Harpertown.
"While Apple's latest Xserve uses the Intel Harpertown quad-core, Core 2 Xeon CPU, it is in all other regards the glorious antithesis of a PC server.... Xserve is built and supported to run not for one or two years, but three years, five years, and beyond. If you think I'm having you on, try to find a bargain Xserve on the refurbished market.
"The pleasant surprise is the price of a fully loaded Xserve. Harpertown Xserve with eight 3GHz cores, 3TB of internal hardware RAID storage, and 32GB of RAM cruises in at under $10,000. There are 1U x86 rack servers with smaller price tags, to be sure, but none that can be taken so far in one chassis as Xserve for the money, and no PC server carries pervasive big iron design to the mainstream as Xserve does."
Want to hear more? Read the full review.
Posted by Caroline Craig on May 6, 2008 07:06 AM
May 01, 2008 | Comments: (0)
New iPhone spawns rampant rumors
Zack Urlocker isn't apologizing for being a bit iPhone obsessed of late. And as he writes in his blog, there is a lot to get excited about -- in the rumor department, anyway.
"Looks like the new iPhone is slated for release in June and will include a new firmware upgrade 2.0 as well as some new capabilities ... including 3G support, the possibility of a 5 megapixel camera, video recording and playback, FM radio, and a capuccino maker. Ok, I'm kidding about the capuccino maker."
There is also speculation that "there may be a new formfactor iPhone announced in June, possibly a flip version with a larger screen or a slide-out keyboard. Whoo-hoo! If you're thinking of getting an iPhone you may want to consider waiting a bit longer."
Posted by Caroline Craig on May 1, 2008 08:37 AM
April 29, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Daily News beat for April 29, 2008
The world's largest contract laptop maker is warning that a shortage of batteries could hurt smaller PC vendors.
AOL and Yahoo will provide fee-based VoIP features in their AIM and Yahoo Messenger IM services, and for the first time AOL has given external developers access to its Call Out feature via APIs.
Internet telephony startup Ribbit launched a service today that merges telephony with Salesforce.com's on-demand CRM software.
Around 100 laptop designs based on AMD's upcoming Puma platform are being readied ahead of the chips' scheduled launch in June.
HP is enhancing SOA quality management capabilities in several products in a bid designed to bring SOA more into the mainstream of IT.
Posted by Caroline Craig on April 29, 2008 09:33 AM
April 10, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Preview: Sun's two-way eight-way
When it unwrapped the Niagara 2 (known as the T2), Sun upped the ante, addressing some of the flaws in the Niagara 1, and pushing even more smarts onto the CPU die.
"Now, with the introduction of the T5240, they're doubling that up,” Paul Venezia writes. "Sun introduced the T5240 [on Wednesday], showcasing the 2U, dual-CPU system as the next step in SPARC-based server evolution. I've had a T5240 in the lab for a few days now, and will be writing a full review of the unit soon, but for now, I'll stick to the highlights."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on April 10, 2008 06:50 AM
April 08, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Every company has ditzy end users.
The type that learn laptops don't bounce gracefully just a little too late, or wonder how their notebook ever went missing when they checked it as luggage before a flight.
Our Off the Record author wonders why they don't get penalized in Laptop abuses and follies.
"It's unlikely that the owners suffered any consequences other than a mild scolding. Meanwhile, the technicians were obliged to immediately drop everything, find replacement machines, and set them up, shipping them priority overnight to the users."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on April 8, 2008 09:12 AM
April 04, 2008 | Comments: (0)
HP aggravates its own failure rate
It's annoying enough when you suffer a high failure rate on the PCs you're getting from a vendor, Ed Foster explains.
"But, as one reader has recently experienced with HP, what can be vastly more aggravating is when you can't get them to tell you the solution, even though they apparently know it."
HP aggravates it's failure rate.
"I have some news for you regarding HP that, on one level, really isn't news ... but it's still pathetic," the reader wrote. "To date I've called in three bad motherboards, with a fourth call about to be placed later this week; plus two dead hard drives; and today, I found one hard drive on the brink of failure. That's a 25 percent failure rate."
Which vendor is aggravating you with its failure rate? Post comments and experiences below or via the link to Foster’s story.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on April 4, 2008 07:02 AM
April 02, 2008 | Comments: (0)
While IT shops ban Apple's iPhone, "attitudes like these show an utter contempt for the real purpose of IT and a misunderstanding of IT's role in a business," writes Stephen Hultquist, author of our CIO Views blog.
Instead, Hultquist argues, "IT exists to support the business, not to decide what's allowed and what's not. Control isn't the point."
"Forcing users into limitations that they don't want to accept never works, and it gives the illusion of security and compliance where none actually exists."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on April 2, 2008 09:15 AM
April 02, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Why users should manage their own PCs
It sounds downright crazy, indeed, but the practice of letting users choose and manage their hardware and software just might be 21st Century IT.
The notion is gaining purchase at some large corporations, such as BP and Google. Some say it makes workers more productive and empowers them to more closely align their own interests with those of the business.
IT heresy revisited: Let users manage their own PCs.
Although the concept certainly has some detractors, current and future workforces are ready -- a reality that will only continue.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on April 2, 2008 04:46 AM
March 31, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Keeping the debate alive, a reader writes into Bob Lewis about previous posts discussing the viability of unlocked PCs and stating that, when it comes to workers downloading apps onto their PCs, "the reward that something might happen there of value is far out weighed by the risk the corporation faces."
Yes, but no so fast, Lewis asserts in Another take on opening PCs, or not. And while it's true that risks associated with random, aimless activity far exceed the potential benefit, that's beside the point.
"All I have to say is that if your employer hires employees who spend most of their time engaged in random, aimless activity, the company has a much bigger problem than the risk of a computer virus."
Related: More on whether or not to open PCs.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on March 31, 2008 10:23 AM
March 31, 2008 | Comments: (0)
The "surprisingly affordable" M6300 is a "superb portable for the demanding user," Andrew Binstock found during the course of several weeks in which he used the notebook.
Binstock goes on to call it "a breed apart; legitimately, a laptop workstation. I suspect, however, that many users will see it as a superior business laptop. And given its reasonable pricing, the only thing those power users will have to consider carefully when examining this system is whether they can comfortably deal with the weight. If so, they'll find a truly terrific machine."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on March 31, 2008 06:14 AM
March 27, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Sun's SPARC platform may have become, in tester's Paul Venezia's word, "bereft" since its heyday way beak when in the late eighties and early nineties.
But nowadays, "the SPARC platform still has some kick left, and while that may not be in clock speed, it's certainly in the threads," Venezia writes.
"Overall, the UltraSPARC T2 and the T5120 build upon the hallmarks of the first-generation UltraSPARC T1-based servers, and remind us that although the SPARC CPU may have been marginalized in recent years, it hasn't surrendered, and may in fact be making a comeback."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on March 27, 2008 08:44 AM
March 27, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Dirty little secret of multi-core chips
While AMD and Intel pound their chests, boasting about new chip cores, developers must labor to keep up.
"The dirty little secret (and it's not all that secret) is that the gap between hardware and software has never been greater. Today's software can barely (if at all) take advantage of quad-core processors, but Intel and AMD seem to be giddy with rivalry, rushing to push out chips with even more cores," Bill Snyder writes in this week's Tech's Bottom Line, in which he asks Multi-core to leave developers in the dust?
Posted by Tom Sullivan on March 27, 2008 08:24 AM
March 26, 2008 | Comments: (0)
First, an ending: Please understand that when I dig into AMD CPUs and platforms as technology and foundation for IT strategy and investment, I simply see so many changes for the better.
Tom Yager wrote that in AMD's ready to scale you up.
When you get to know Opteron, Yager explains, you'll find many more features than generic x86 and x64 operating systems use.
"You will scale up your quad-core Opteron servers merely by installing a Windows or Linux point release that includes Opteron-specific optimizations, or changing the architectural target of the projects you compile in-house."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on March 26, 2008 08:11 AM
March 26, 2008 | Comments: (0)
First, an ending: Please understand that when I dig into AMD CPUs and platforms as technology and foundation for IT strategy and investment, I simply see so many changes for the better.
Tom Yager wrote that in AMD's ready to scale you up.
When you get to know Opteron, Yager explained, you'll find many more features than generic x86 and x64 operating systems use.
"You will scale up your quad-core Opteron servers merely by installing a Windows or Linux point release that includes Opteron-specific optimizations, or changing the architectural target of the projects you compile in-house."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on March 26, 2008 08:11 AM
March 25, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Sprinklers matter in the server room
Servers and water do not a good pair make, but not all CFOs know that.
Our Off the Record author learned that the hard way in How to keep your servers moist.
His company's CFO in particular downgraded the server room with good old standard sprinklers, which eventually brought the company infrastructure to its knees.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on March 25, 2008 06:05 AM
March 19, 2008 | Comments: (0)
In just 8 months Apple redefined the entire smartphone market, or so CEO Steve Jobs claims.
"This mirrors the swipes that Apple used to take at Microsoft. They're always delivered with the Jobsian wink and smirk, but they are far from the offhand remarks they're packaged to be," Tom Yager writes in Apple's BlackBerry offensive.
"In BlackBerry's case, Jobs took the opportunity to reveal some little-known information about BlackBerry -- widely published, just not the kind of details that BlackBerry users care about -- and portray it as a powerful disadvantage that makes the fresh technology that iPhone brings to the market a necessity."
Then again, Yager points out, "there are some facts stated by Steve Jobs that were flat wrong."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on March 19, 2008 06:20 AM
March 10, 2008 | Comments: (0)
IT's credibility may be at stake with users
Your users likely have two very different computing experiences. One is at home with their own PC, the other in the office with a corporate-owned machine.
At home they have Office, e-mail, AOL or MSN, photo software, Skype, games, browser plug-ins, iTunes, handheld interface software, Quicken, TurboTax and the list goes on.
“Then they go to work, where they have MS Office, Outlook, a browser with no plug-ins allowed, and nothing else. Knowledgeable people like you inform them it has to be this way because if you allow anything else it will all fall apart,” Bob Lewis writes in More on whether or not to open up PCs.
The thing is, at home it has not fallen apart. Instead everything works together. No earth-shattering explosions.
“This is the world IT is living in: End-users who find themselves using crippled technology at work compared to what they use routinely at home,” Lewis reports. “IT’s credibility is at stake.”
Lewis takes it one step further in this Keep the Joint Running article.
"It might be time -- past time -- for IT to look at its job in a new way."
What’s your take? Talkback below.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on March 10, 2008 11:29 AM
March 06, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Daily news beat for March 6, 2008
Intel confirms that it will deliver this year a six-core chip, code-named Dunnington and part of the Xeon lineup and enables a four-processor box to have up to 24 cores.
Microsoft posted a beta of IE8 that is intended primarily for developers but the company says anyone can download and use it. Team Redmond also released Silverlight 2 beta, which features support for managed code and developing with multiple languages.
University researchers in Germany create a model that predicts programming errors in applications and, they claim, can ultimately save software makers money.
Navigation devices take center stage at Cebit and bring a number of new functions, including more realistic illustrations of the road ahead, and better advice on which lane to take when approaching complex intersections.
And Bill Gates dips down to the world’s third richest spot after 13 years an the top, a fact attributable to the declining price of Microsoft stock since its bid to acquire Yahoo.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on March 6, 2008 09:42 AM
March 05, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Making PCs more Mac-like (yes, that's a good thing)
Having just taken delivery of a box holding a reference system for AMD’s new Cartwheel 780G series desktop platform, Tom Yager has found a machine that brings Windows closer to a Mac user experience.
Yager is referring to how on a Mac's first connection to the Internet, all of that specific model's latest device drivers and firmware are downloaded and installed in one hands-off operation.
“Surely, if someone were given a chance to lay out the requirements for a PC standard from scratch, this sort of simplicity would be among them,” Yager writes in PCs approach Mac simplicity, courtesy of AMD.
There are, of course, limitations. BIOS presents one, audio another.
And while that time is not here yet, Yager writes, “I can still see a day when an AMD platform-based PC will boot from a Microsoft install disc, connect to AMD.com, automatically identify and download the latest unified drivers, and come to life as a fully optimized PC, all without the user's intervention. That's as it should be, and as I've said, I think that AMD is the only outfit that could pull this off.”
Posted by Tom Sullivan on March 5, 2008 07:35 AM
March 04, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Which vendor is driving you crazy?
It’s the same old lie, only different, with its own intricacies.
Drive manufacturer Western Digital tries to wiggle its way out of backing an 18-month old drive that carries a three-year warranty by claiming on its RMA site that said drive was no longer under warranty.
Way down in the boilerplates, a Gripe Line reader found a hidden disclaimer: that the warranty commences when the product is manufactured, not when it is purchased.
But this Caviar drive was not sitting in some warehouse of the high-volume retailer from which it was purchased for 18 months before our reader bought it, he researched and confirmed.
“Western Digital knows damn well that this drive is under warranty and is doing their best to trick me into 'upgrading' my drive,” the reader writes in Western Digital lies about warranty status. “I don't know if the other drive manufacturers are any better, but I'll certainly be looking to them next time."
Which vendor is driving you crazy? Talkback via the comments function below or at the link above.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on March 4, 2008 07:14 AM
February 28, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Apple and Lenovo's latest slender laptops, the MacBook Air and ThinkPad X300 respectively, are both slim, sleek and, to some folks at least, even sexy.
But there's more to a notebook PC than love at first sight. Take eco-friendliness, for instance. The Electronic Product Environmental Assessment tool, aka EPEAT, lets you search for the varying levels of greenness the group assigns products, including PC hardware.
Both notebooks offer green advantages over rivals, boast low-power processors, are Energy Star 4.0 compliant, and use fewer materials. Further, they're both are designed for easy disassembling end-of-life management. Yet one garnered Gold status while the other earned Silver.
And the winner is ... well now, hold on just a second.
"As I learned this week by comparing the EPEAT standings of Apple and Lenovo's recently released ultra-thin notebooks, a vendor can reap precious points to boost a product's rating a full color grade by meeting criteria that arguably don't translate into meaningful green benefits for the buyer," Ted Samson writes in MacBook Air vs. ThinkPad X300: Which is greener?
Samson closes with some shopping advice: a higher status ranking, or price tag, does not necessarily make for a greener product. "Take a moment to study differences among products."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on February 28, 2008 05:24 AM
February 26, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Daily news beat for Feb. 26, 2008
IBM today made some mainframe moves, unveiling a new System z10 machine and, along with it, software and resources to help educate programmers about how to more easily develop, administer, automate and deploy mainframe applications.
Lenovo strikes up a challenge for Apple in the form of ThinkPad X300, which it claims is more feature-rich than Apple's MacBook Air, while still pushing the envelope of lightweight ultraportable PCs. On the full-size notebook front Apple, for its part, unveils pumped up MacBook and MacBook Pros, adding bigger hard drives and 45-nanometer Penryn chips. (Thanks to Computerworld for that last one.)
Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz talks up MySQL as the acquisition closes, saying that the open source database is not only a perfect fit in terms of culture, business and technology, but also the most important purchase in Sun's history.
Network Solutions faces a class-action lawsuit alleging that it has unfairly profited from its questionable practice of automatically reserving a domain name once someone runs a search on it.
And a Google official, speaking at the Adobe Engage conference, says that Google's fate is tied to the Web, and that is exactly why the search company is working on social networking initiative, applications and platforms.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on February 26, 2008 10:41 AM
February 14, 2008 | Comments: (0)
One fat PC that serves 30 users
The fat PC might not be dead, but that isn't stopping NComputing from sculpting its product line around the reality that the average desktop packs more processing muscle than users need, or use.
As such, NComputing's technology enables as many as 30 users to simultaneously run virtualized Windows or Linux desktop sessions from a single standard PC, Ted Samson reports. What's more, Samson declares such evolutions of the thin client to be green alternatives to desktops.
"Time will tell, of course, whether more large companies will be game to trade in some or all of their high-end PCs for thin clients, whether from NComputing, Wyse, or any other vendor," Samson writes in NComputing puts excess PC Power to good use.
With IDC predicting 20 percent growth in thin clients, that outlook is good right about now.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on February 14, 2008 05:54 AM
February 13, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Criticism of our MacBook Air review
Not everyone is thrilled with our review this week of Apple's MacBook Air. One voice of dissent, who writes for The Inquirer, even goes so far as to call tester Paul Venezia a "fanboy reviewer."
"Isn't it odd that although I'm apparently a 'hack' trying to put positive spin on Apple's products, I decided to write an entire sidebar about a negative experience?" Venezia writes in Let the Games begin.
This is hardly the first time that a Test Center evaluation of an Apple product has caused a stir.
"Last July, InfoWorld Chief Technologist Tom Yager wrote a review of the iPhone that drew, shall we say, a little flak. After he evaluated the iPhone as a device for enterprise users, Tom gave it a measly score of 4.9 out of 10. Vitriolic Apple fans accused Tom of taking bribes from Microsoft (four months later, his decision to award Apple's Leopard OS a perfect 10 drew accusations he was on Apple's payroll. We look forward to finding out what other companies are paying him, too)," editor-in-chief Eric Knorr explains in Mobile madness: iPhone, MacBooks and Android.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on February 13, 2008 04:18 AM
February 12, 2008 | Comments: (0)
MacBook Air finds its Nietzsche
Apple wants to push the design envelope with its latest notebook, the MacBook Air, Paul Venezia points out. "Apple has had a history of making big changes and taking big chances with their hardware," he writes in The MacBook Air finds its Nietzsche. This time around that means doing away with a built-in optical drive, legacy ports, FireWire, fixed RAM -- all of which, some might say, handicap the system. "I've come to realize that I don't think that's the case at all," Venezia writes. "I gaze around my lab, noting all the random cables, connectors, components, and options. It's a stark contrast to the lithe little laptop in front of me. It's the antithesis, and I think that's a good thing."
Venezia's article is an accompaniment to his in-depth review of the MacBook Air.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on February 12, 2008 06:44 AM
February 11, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Sexy. Thin. Ultraportable. Apple's MacBook Air is all of those. And while the Air has Paul Venezia rethinking some of his preconceived notions of what to expect from a computer, users face the same questions that the smallest notebook on the market, from whichever manufacturer happens to make it at the time, always brings: Could I live without a bevy of ports and a DVD drive? Could I use the Air to do real work? The lack of an optical disk could be a problem for some, Venezia ultimately finds that whether or not the Air is for you depends entirely on your needs. Read the full review.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on February 11, 2008 04:52 AM
December 13, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Best of the blogs: Personally, I've not shed a single tear over CompUSA's intent to close retail outlets, but Martin Heller has. "They usually had a better selection of equipment that I wanted to try than my local Best Buy or Circuit City, or my local mom-and-pop computer shops," is just the first reason, Heller explains, in Why I'll miss CompUSA. "Sic transit gloria mundi. Maybe my local store will continue under new ownership."
Hardware: "AMD has had the kind of bad luck that just happens in all sorts of endeavors, and is common to all players in the semiconductor industry," Tom Yager writes in Bad luck has AMD cowering. He's referring, of course, to commercial availability delays that will result from a flaw affecting a CPU unit known as the translation look-aside buffer, aka TLB. "End-users won't feel it, it won't cost AMD any OEM wins, and AMD will have a strong position in Q1 '08, where Intel has all eyes focused."
Careers: A distressed reader writes into Bob Lewis' Advice Line with an ostensibly simple question. "If staff who have one good year shouldn't be rewarded forever for it, why then should they be punished forever for having one bad year?" Lewis points out that such action is sometimes necessary. How long should a disciplinary freeze last? "Whether either of us agree with a particular disciplinary action, when an employee successfully corrects the issue and is back on course, the compensation freeze should end."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on December 13, 2007 04:47 AM
December 07, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Best of the blogs: Zack Urlocker spent 15 minutes with Kindle, Amazon's new portable e-book reader. The display, he writes, is fantastic. "To me, it's as easy to read as a book." Hands-on: Amazon Kindle. What's more, it's "not nearly so ugly in person as it appears in photos." That said, though, "if you've already got a cell phone, a Blackberry, an iPod and a laptop, then adding one more device seems like overkill," Urlocker writes. "But if the Kindle could be a general purpose browser and email device, that would be a different story."
Tech's bottom line: Surveys by three firms demonstrate that the credit crunch and potential for a recession have IT execs on the alert about spending next year, with the software sector taking the biggest hit. One of those firms, JMP, has been conducting the survey for seven years, and according to analyst Patrick Walravens, the result is the worst since 2001. "The potential rate cut is dominating the thinking of investors right now," Bill Snyder explains in Analysts predict IT squeeze. "The market is counting on a cut of at least one-quarter of a point and that news is essentially priced into stocks at this point. A half-point cut would obviously be welcomed with a rally, while a stand-pat stance would makes things ugly in a big hurry."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on December 7, 2007 04:54 AM
December 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)
The Linux server we couldn't break
From the InfoWorld Test Center: Stratus has introduced the ftServer 4400 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server and, in so doing, created "a completely redundant server," Paul Venezia writes. "Yes, I do mean completely redundant." Stratus, with the ftServer line, effectively bundles two discrete servers into a single entity -- but Venezia maintains that doesn't mean the ftServer is a cluster. It's not perfect, though. The CPUs are slower than Venezia would like, it would be nice to have the option of an Intel quad-core chip, and the price is higher than a clustered solution. The upside? "I couldn't break the ftServer 4400. It just runs. If the goal is a completely fault-tolerant single-server solution, look no further." Read the full review.
The news beat: Salesforce.com unveils Salesforce to Salesforce, which it claims enables any company using its platform to integrate and share data. Red Hat announces MRG software for messaging, real-time and grid, and aims it at IBM and Tibco. Verizon hedges on using Google's Android platform for mobile development. And Microsoft says that a Windows flaw could steer IE to hackers and could potentially expose some customers to online attacks.
Careers: In response to a previous Advice Line entry, one reader writes in commenting that he mostly agrees with Bob Lewis, but that "good leaders need to give some folks a dope slap every now and then to wake them up." The heart of this issue is blame, how best praise those who identify and fix mistakes, and how to handle those who made them in the first place. "The trick, I think, is to separate the process of handling incidents from the process of managing employee performance," Lewis asserts in Ignore mistakes? "Holding someone accountable for an honest mistake is rarely ... probably never ... a good idea."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on December 5, 2007 05:35 AM
November 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)
InfoWorld's 7 must-have gadgets
From the feature well: Children are the not only ones consumed by thoughts of toys this time of year. No, adults too dream of receiving great gifts, and geeks are no exception. If you want something that not everyone else has already discovered, we've got seven such items for you. InfoWorld's must-have gadgets. We're not talking iPhones or Parallels Desktop here, either. For starters, Sun Microsystems Project Sun Spot, a developer kit for sensors and robotics, is one example. Amazon's Kindle e-book reader is another.
Test center review: As I promised yesterday, the full review of Apple's Leopard client is live. And it's the first time InfoWorld has ranked a product with a perfect 10. Ever. "Seldom does reality exceed expectations. When it does by such a wide margin, you have to call it the way you see it," editor-in-chief Eric Knorr explains. So, how did Apple do it? Tom Yager answers that with two words: focus and motivation. "Apple hasn't reserved any of the Mac platform's goodies for itself, and users don't need to wait (or spend) for apps that expose the platform's richness in productive ways," Yager adds. Related: Editor's Letter: Leopard lands a perfect 10.
Notes from the field: Robert X. Cringely is still feeling the holiday hangover, just a bit, and figures this is as good a time as any to troll through the ol' reader mailbox and "share a little of what Cringesters have been telling me outside the confines of this blog." Readers write (and bite) back. Topics include Google's possible bid for wireless spectrum, his ribbing of Deputy National Security Director Donald Kerr, and the fact that his recent Gobbler Awards did not include Vista. "In general, I find pretending to be stupid is an excellent way to mask actually being stupid," Cringe confesses. Related: Gobble gobble: Biggest turkeys of 2007.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on November 27, 2007 04:40 AM
November 09, 2007 | Comments: (0)
How Dell's support upgrade doubles as a profit center
Best of the blogs: Dell's Support Center 2.0 helps support Dell support, in the words of Ed Foster. A reader received an alert from Dell saying he needed to upgrade but after doing so a blank pop-up DOS screen sprang into his screen every five minutes, and with each log on came the Dell support folder rearing its head. Dell said the problem was probably a virus. But when our reader explained his upgrade predicament, the rep informed him it would cost $29.95 to continue the conversation. "I guess this is a good way for Dell to earn a little extra money -- have everyone install a buggy Support Center upgrade and then charge them all when they call to report the problem," the reader writes. In this Gripe Line post Foster adds that the reader is not the only one to encounter this. "It's one thing for a vendor to take an aggressive approach to helping its customers, but it's quite another if the aggression is really aimed at drumming up business for its paid support."
Green IT: Digital Realty became the first company to earn LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification for its datacenter facility. But what's most interesting about the achievement is that the building was constructed in 1917 as a printing plant. "Like so many sustainable technology efforts, a LEED endeavor results in significant long-term cost savings through waste reduction," Ted Samson explains in Taking the LEED on building green. Digital Realty is not alone, either. Adobe and Qualcomm, for examples, have both enjoyed significant savings from reduced energy waste. "One of the common threads among these projects is the IT components, such as tools for monitoring and managing heat and lighting through a network. Once again, it demonstrates just how critical a role IT plays in helping organizations undergo green transformations."
Notes from the field: Donning a Paul Revere cap and cloak, Robert X. Cringely calls out a similar warning, albeit of the cyber sort: the e-jihadists are coming, the e-jihadists are coming! In which Mr. Cringely is referring to Electronic Jihad 2.0. "Despite the software's silly name, I was curious whether this might be something worth worrying about. So I did a little more digging. The software is real -- in fact, I downloaded a copy of it yesterday off an archived copy of al-jinan.org. But if this is a serious terror threat, I'm Arnold Schwarzenegger." Instead, Cringe muses, it could be a publicity campaign, a recruiting tool for noobs, or even an attempt to prove just how gullible we Westerners truly are.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on November 9, 2007 05:03 AM
November 08, 2007 | Comments: (0)
The problem with Intel inside Macs: Recovery
Platforms: After losing a month's work, research and creative projects, to say nothing of registration keys and activation, Tom Yager has this to write: "I can barely contain my glee at having so grand an opportunity as this to learn a new way." The problem, you see, is that the MacBook Pro Apple loaned him slipped into what Yager calls a coma -- and be blames the Intel chip. "This wouldn't happen to a PowerPC Mac." The new road to recovery is worse than the old one. So he took to the cloud, went browser-based and lightweight mobile to avoid a similar loss in the future. The lesson in all this? "I now know that my recoverability expectations for Macs should not exceed those that I associate with PCs."
Open source: In the Ubuntu plunge Day 2 Randall Kennedy admits to feeling spoiled. "After years of enduring one questionable Microsoft UI decision after another, I'm having a blast tweaking and re-skinning gnome under Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon," he writes. Not that it's entirely smooth, bug-free, or lacking application weirdness, just that "the reward is worth it: I now have a nice, pseudo-Mac OS X-ish UI with a nice, funky icon set." Only two days and the blueblood Windows user has his day-to-day environment established and ready for work. "I'm actually starting to enjoy my new digs." Related: The Ubuntu plunge, Day 1: VM madness, and Why Ubuntu (still) sucks, part 5.
Networking: With two new switches Cisco is, in the words of Paul Venezia, giving "admins and network architects plenty to get excited about." Those are the Catalyst 4500 E-series and the Catalyst 6500. Speed boosts, Virtual Switching Systems, improved diagnostics, the Supervisor 720-10G, Multi-chassis EtherChannel, are some of the highlights. "If the new supervisor for the 6500 series does what Cisco claims, it will mark a turning point in redundant networking." Read the full analysis.
SOA: David Linthicum reports from the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum in New York City, where the morning highlight was a keynote titled "Laying the SOA Foundation" delivered by Pfizer's Martin Brodbeck. "He was very data focused, which I think took the audience back. I mean, why talk about data when you can talk about services? The truth is data becomes services, thus the starting point of data," Linthicum explains.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on November 8, 2007 04:50 AM
September 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Columnist's corner: This week, Tom Yager revisits an earlier episode about a friend who switched the "OS for her entire computer-using life" from, you guessed it, a PC to a Mac. "Wild horses driven by a grinning Steve Ballmer carrying $100,000 couldn't drag her back into Windows," he writes in More Mac sense and nonsense. "She knows that I'm an Apple Developer Connection Premiere member and that I have Leopard, and she thinks I'm a jerk for not letting her use it." What's more, she's eagerly anticipating Leopard so much that its October release cannot come fast enough. As for Yager himself, though, "I can't pretend that Vista doesn't exist."
Platforms: What does Halo 3, Microsoft's entertainment software, have to do with the enterprise? Plenty. "The xBox and Halo are examples for what Microsoft's strengths and weaknesses are, and reveal a lot about with Microsoft is capable of: creating an application that allows real-time collaboration in virtual world by teams of people who've never met, over a heterogeneous network -- all without so much as an ipconfig/renew," Sean Gallagher explains in Microsoft's Halo effect. True, Microsoft might not even realize it that way, particularly since it has hardware troubles with xBox. "So, maybe we're lucky that Microsoft can't provide the same end-to-end experience with Windows in the enterprise that it can with xBox in the living room."
Careers: A visionary twice-over writes into Bob Lewis wondering where to find a great second-in-command. "Having a partner is tough. Making a partnership work requires two rare circumstances," Lewis starts. "As to where you find them ... as with all recruiting, it's a matter of building your personal network and beating the bushes." No easy answers here, folks.
SOA: The notion that you can continue doing things the same way and, ultimately, address architecture at some point in the future equates to "saying there's no time or money to do things right now, but there's time to do it over and over again," asserts Dave Linthicum in this Real World SOA post. Clearly, that approach is senseless, even if it is a quick and easy fix. But, and this is an important "but," delaying actually costs more, and not just money, either. "I'm constantly surprised how much is wasted around ineffective and static architectures that are not able meet the needs of business."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on September 27, 2007 04:36 AM
September 11, 2007 | Comments: (0)
The genius that is Apple's iPhone rebate
Best of the blogs: News that Apple sold its millionth iPhone sparked Ephraim Schwartz to wonder: Was the iPhone price cut and rebate part of an ingenious marketing plan? "They are giving back $100 on every iPhone sold that means they are losing $100 million dollars. That has to be more than chump change even for Apple," he writes in this Reality Check post. "Well, things are not always as they seem."
Columnist's corner: A look back at the best of Off The Record, our anonymous blog penned by readers -- and one of our most popular. These favorites include, among others, "The ghost in the mainframe," and "How many techs does it take to turn on a computer?" And, a call to action: Tell us your real-world IT tale or horror story and, if we publish it, we'll send a payment of $50 along with a slick new t-shirt.
The news beat: Adobe and BEA band together to inject rich Internet applications with SOA and Web 2.0 capabilities by bundling Adobe's Flex Builder 2 with BEA's Workshop Studio. A California group requests a five-year extension of Microsoft antitrust judgment, the middleware portions of the ruling specifically, because Microsoft still retains a huge lead in the OS and browser realms. With a new point release, Sun is accommodating Linux in Solaris via its Containers functionality. And Fujitsu guards corporate PCs with a new version of its Palm Secure log-in.
Careers: Bob Lewis offers Government by the numbers 3,1,3,4 in response to a reader inquiring for some advice about making the switch from private enterprise to a county organization. "What you probably need to adjust are your expectations," Lewis explains. "That isn't because you now work for a government entity. It's because you work for a different entity."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on September 11, 2007 10:56 AM
September 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Devices that best the iPhone, part 2
From the Test Center: In the second installment of his review series, Tom Yager examines seven serious phones for real mobile professionals. "The iPhone is wonderful for well-heeled consumers and status-conscious gadget freaks, but business users need more ... much more," Yager kicks off Supersmart phones for extreme mobility. So what makes a great enterprise handset? For starters, "it must be highly configurable to match infrastructure and potentially to adapt to changes in geography or work assignment." And that's just the beginning.
Gripe Line: The Web is increasingly becoming, and not for the better, a one-way information highway. Consider those vendor sites that collect personal data but don't give much in return. "Have you noticed that the Internet is growing holes - many of them deliberately put there?" one reader poses. "Lately, I have been noticing many companies, even those trying to sell Internet goods, with no contact e-mail addresses! If you call the phone number, you get the voice recorder. If you send an e-mail blindly to say 'support@widget.com', you get an automated email directing you back to the website that bumfuzzled you in the first place."
Quoteworthy: My personal feeling is Microsoft has time. ODF [Open Document Format], its open source rival, is still in its nascent stage. Given even a year's head start over OOXML, ODF will have an uphill struggle, to understate the size of the battle, before it is ever able to seriously challenge the huge Microsoft Office installed base. -- Ephraim Schwartz, ISO rejects Microsoft's OOXML but the battle is far from over.
Gripe Line: The Web is increasingly becoming, and not for the better, a one-way information highway. Consider those vendors sites that collect information but don't give much in return. "Have you noticed that the Internet is growing holes - many of them deliberately put there?" one reader poses. "Lately, I have been noticing many companies, even those trying to sell Internet goods, with no contact e-mail addresses! If you call the phone number, you get the voice recorder. If you send an e-mail blindly to say 'support@widget.com', you get an automated email directing you back to the website that bumfuzzled you in the first place."
Careers: There is a difference between objectives and management objectives. Bob Lewis explains just that in the most recent Advice Line. Lewis breaks them up into 'objectives' and 'goals' for clarity's sake. "It's the difference between describing what will actually happen (goals) and what the business will achieve as a result (objective)." Of course, that approach does not work everywhere. "There's a type of dysfunctional company -- where everyone 'hides behind the herd' -- where knowing whether you've succeeded or failed is that last thing anyone would want to do."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on September 6, 2007 05:03 AM
September 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)
How the ideal ultraportable might look
Hardware: What with Palm's eleventh hour dismissal of the Foleo, Zack Urlocker wonders just what features, size and shape would constitute the perfect lightweight PC. Palm did some things right with Foleo, such as choosing Linux as the OS. But others, namely positioning it as a so-called smartphone companion, were off-the-mark. "I think they should have aimed for a form factor much closer to the old Psion 5," Urlocker explains.
Columnist's corner: Even though the wireless market is luring in impulse buyers and, once hooked, keeping them in large and long contracts, businesses need not take the bait. "I'm astonished that Executive Platinum frequent flyers, people who negotiate multimillion-dollar deals, put themselves at the mercy of wireless operators," writes Tom Yager in Don't settle for consumer rates. "Even a consumer who buys wireless phones and service from the Web, the mall, or the retail showroom is just begging to be treated like a sucker." The solution? Yager offers tips on negotiating to get what you deserve.
Notes from the field: The occasionally eerie Mr. Cringely chimes in today with four tales of tech terror. The BIOS from beyond the grave is one such yarn; voice menus of the living dead is another.
The news beat: Oracle buys Bridgestream to get its employee role mapping software and, ultimately, add it to Oracle's Identity Management suite. Cognos scoops up Applix for its performance analysis software, TM1, which it hopes will boost its own software's ability to analyze financial data. And NEC debuts the Valuestar W water-cooled multimedia PC.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on September 5, 2007 11:12 AM
September 04, 2007 | Comments: (0)
New Apple iPods coming tomorrow?
Notes from the field: Cringely reports that another Apple special event is coming. "Tomorrow, Apple will unveil ... something. Smart money is on a new iPod that looks a lot like the iPhone, runs the Mac OS, and updates via Wi-Fi," he writes. Either that or a "new, less stratospherically priced iPhone Nano with a smaller form factor but limited Internet chops." Then again, Jobs might just speak the words "iTunes," and "Meet the Beatles" in the same sentence.
From the feature well: Leon Urlanger asks are unified communications here at last? "Today IP telephony and UC are moving toward a more IT-centric software architecture, laying the groundwork for broader acceptance," he writes. "Everyone agrees that the increasing penetration of SOA and related integration technologies is setting the stage for increased UC adoption. But UC vendors, including Microsoft and Oracle, recognize this as a long-term process."
Video: This time, a three-minute primer on strategies that promise to ease storage management and meet compliance regulations, while making data retrieval fast. Watch it here.
The news beat: Oracle buys Netsure Telecom for its network intelligence and data integrity software. ISO votes against approving Microsoft's Office Open XML document format in the fast track process. The U.S. DOD says that the e-mail attack against it caused no damage. And a security expert finds 'stupid' holes in Oracle 11g through which attackers could steal data.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on September 4, 2007 11:08 AM
July 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Sprint stalls on promised feature
Best of the blogs: Readers are understandably frustrated about advertised features that are missing in action on the actual products. In today's Gripe Line, Ed Foster reveals a long-promised feature from Sprint that has yet to materialize: A reader complains of plunking down $350 for what he was told was an EVDO-capable smartphone, only to have two years go by (and his phone contract lapse) with nary a sign of Sprint enabling EVDO capability in its 6600 phone. Get the full story here.
In the news: Intel unleashes another round of cuts in its price battles with AMD. The tit-for-tat price war has been painful for both companies, but great for users. An IEEE group agrees to work on a single Ethernet standard that covers both 40Gbps and 100Gbps speeds. A standard for the faster Ethernet may be completed by mid-2010. The FBI reports that a series of raids and arrests in China has ended what is estimated to be the world's largest software piracy syndicate. The gang has been in operation for more than six years, producing fraudulent copies of software from Microsoft and Symantec.
Enterprise computing: What's an IT staff to do if the CEO gets an iPhone? While IT managers are likely skeptical of letting iPhones on their networks, there are a few easy steps they can take to make their lives easier (and their boss ecstatic). Find out the full story here.
Posted by Caroline Craig on July 24, 2007 07:09 AM
July 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Samsung advertises imaginary option
Gripe Line: What happens when an LCD monitor advertised as having optional integrated speakers actually has no such capability? Well, if you're a Samsung 225BW buyer, that answer, I'm afraid, is not much. Other than a whopping headache, perhaps. "It's quite frustrating when the manufacturer essentially tells you take a hike without even changing its erroneous product description," Ed Foster reports in Samsung option is imaginary. The problem is that, even though there are clips on the monitor's back for them, said speakers just don't exist, as one reader learned. Samsung pointed to a retailer, but it didn't have them either. "It truly is inconsiderate to suggest what would be a waste of time on a goose chase," the reader explains.
Open source: In Funding FSF's fight vs. Microsoft, Savio Rodrigues points out that the Free Software Foundation does not exactly have deep pockets. At least not when compared to the likes of Microsoft. "The FSF will need significantly more donations if the GPLv3 debate makes it to the courtroom," he cautions.
Columnist's corner: Given his first project as a lead, our Off the Record author came up against an ostensibly insurmountable dilemma. "Management felt I spent too much time talking to end-users, implying any time talking to them was too much." No team, no staff, no hope. The end-users were tickled to get a system they could really use." This labor of vindication ballooned into a dozen programs that our author worked around the clock to complete on time -- and alone. "Then the troubles came."
Careers: Coming up with good ideas is easier than planning, organization and execution, Bob Lewis asserts in Where are the box's boundaries? "A healthy organization should generate at least an order of magnitude more good ideas than it's in a position to pursue. It's the organizations that have shut off the spigot that concern me."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on July 10, 2007 04:34 AM
June 29, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Calculating the cost of an iPhone
Wireless: Now that they will be officially available this evening, albeit likely hard to find, Apple's iPhone brings the reality of a two-year contract replete with beefy monthly payments. Tom Yager does the math in this Ahead of the Curve post. "What's the absolute minimum cost of iPhone? Add it all up and it comes out to $2,034.75." That number does not include taxes, fees and surcharges which -- as anyone with a telephone can tell you -- account for a healthy portion of one's monthly bill. "That's the cost of a $499 iPhone, a two-year AT&T contract at $59.99 per month and a $36 activation fee." Related: AT&T details iPhone service plans.
Notes from the field: The RIAA is squirming ever deeper into the muck, so writes Robert X. Cringely, referring to the group's nasty suit against a disabled Oregon woman, in which it threatened to bring her 10-year old daughter in for a deposition and even called her school pretending to be a family member. Why grandma, what big attorneys you have. "Incidentally, there is no truth to the rumor Dick Cheney plans to assume control of the RIAA after his current job runs out. But it wouldn't surprise me a bit," Cringe writes.
Green IT: Carbon neutral. Carbon free. These ostensibly noble notions are gaining purchase among tech vendors, true, but Ted Samson asks "is that really the best strategy a company can adopt to reduce its environmental impact?" Since he's raising the issue, you can guess the answer is not some quick and easy "yes". Samson writes, "companies would be better served focusing on boosting efficiency and energy conservation." Virtualization is one approach. Others include power-capping tools, telecommuting programs, solar panels, and PC-power management software. The healthy carbon diet. "If you have an ideal [carbon] weight in mind, the healthiest route is to invest time and money in a sensible diet and exercise regimen."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on June 29, 2007 04:35 AM
June 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Best of the blogs: Which AJAX toolset would you use to develop a mobile application? Tom Yager is at Apple's WWDC, and he shares some thoughts about that. In what Mr. Yager calls the perfect example, Apple CEO Steve Jobs "portrayed AJAX and Web 2.0 as models for the applications of the future, and he added gravity to his point by dropping the name of the 800-pound gorilla in the Web application business, salesforce.com." Back to the mystery with which I began. Well, I'll not spoil it for you, other than this little hint: Steve's ideal iPhone app won't run on an iPhone. Related: iPhone to support 3rd party widgets. Watch the video here.
Columnist's corner: Perhaps the bleaker aspects of Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialist thinkers had a hand in this one, but our Off the Record author could just sense that a project he had undertaken was doomed from the onset. "It had been designed entirely in French!" Parlez-vous IT? No, is the answer in this CRM initiative demanded, of course, by the CEO. "I wasn't aware that the CEO was negotiating a buyout from a larger vendor." Endless meetings, pet projects, politics and nepotism all rear their ugly faces in this one.
The news beat: Five Republican senators pen a letter asking for more hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee moves ahead with the Patent Reform Act. Sun Microsystems says its Solaris Express Developer Edition is tailored for multicore development to make it easy for developers to start building applications for the OS. And VMware moves closer to its Windows-on-a-Mac product, offering up pricing to match rival Parallels, and beginning to take pre-orders. Related Test Center Review: Parallels cozies up to Vista.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on June 12, 2007 10:49 AM
June 11, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Best of the blogs: Keeping our "stupid tricks" theme alive in his own way, Martin Heller shares his experiences with a new Compaq Presario v6000 running Windows Vista Ultimate for x64, and a Sony Vaio. "I tried booting up the Presario, and found its bloatware just as annoying as the Vaio's had been," Heller explains in Strategic Developer. Missing printer drivers, misbehaving networking, and other such panicky moments all surfaced, but "most of the software I have installed so far works."
From the Test Center: What with Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference taking place this week, the recent release of Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac "brings OS X and Windows even closer together than before," writes Paul Venezia. In short: Venezia calls it an amazing product for the price. "Running two heavy operating systems on a single system will result in periodic slowness, especially during high disk I/O operations. But Parallels handles the task elegantly." Read the full review. Related: Apple's Leopard prowls closer.
Hardware: It's an old question, the one regarding whether Macs are more expensive than PCs. Bearing that in mind, Scot Finnie of Computerworld looks at what you can really get for your money these days, in Mac vs. PC cost analysis: How does it all add up? For starters, "neither side has a lock on good value," he writes. "I happen to believe that many of the small details about Macs have a value that's hard to put a price tag on." That makes it hard to factor in other people's individual context. And then there's the software question.
The news beat: Qwest says that CEO Richard Notebaert will retire just as soon as the board appoints a replacement. The Linux Phone Standards Forum releases its first specs, including a reference model, address book, voice call enabler. And Iona adds two components to its Artix Suite as well as several updates.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on June 11, 2007 10:50 AM
May 23, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Some vendors harder to shame than others
Gripe Line: "Today's gripe is a tale about HP and the grueling support gantlet a reader and her son were forced to run to get a broken computer fixed," Ed Foster begins An HP support nightmare and customer recourse. At issue: they sent back the PC which kept turning on and off and flashing green lights across the screen, only to receive it again with the same problem. Oh, and a few scratches here and there, compliments of HP, of course. Repeat. 25 hours on phone support. Still an unusable PC. "I want to emphasize that it could just as easily be about Dell. Or Gateway -- except if it were Gateway, we probably would not have as happy an ending as we can relate here."
Podcasts: Full-contact SOA. Sounds a tad extreme sports-like, perhaps, but it was the topic of David Linthicum's keynote presentation at last week's InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum. Now it's online. "I'm not going to play the entire hour ... just the most interesting part." Tune into The SOA Report here.
Columnist's corner: More "goldfish in a Dixie cup," than big fish in a little pond, our Off the Record author served as MIS manager in a small shop -- where a fateful box turned a monitor blue. (And no, not as in the Blue Screen of Death.) VGA blues. "After months of perfectly ordinary days, the receptionist called me, frantic. When she started her system that morning, the monitor had a horrible tinge to it..."
Live Chat: Let me clarify: this one is actually the full transcript of an archived chat that took place leading up to the Open Source business conference. Doug Dineley and Matt Asay host. That means its chock full of opinion, mostly about Novell, Microsoft and the current state of open source, not to mention irony and debate about whether applications that run on Linux and Apache are, by nature, open source. Discussion also touches upon how open source winds its way up to the CIO, gains leverage, and the worst thing about proprietary products for customers.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on May 23, 2007 04:47 AM
May 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Even in IT, lunacy is relative
Columnist's corner: Disbelievers in the paranormal, think again! That's the advice our Off the Record author offers in The ghost who sabotaged the mainframe. "The story really starts back in December of 1971..." A week later, his predecessor, Ernie, was in a fatal car crash. Back in the office, though, the door to the limited-access computer room opened and closed -- while every single person with permissions to it was in a meeting down the hall. Lights flickered. Soft breezes stirred. The most bizarre hardware problems HP had ever dealt with arose in the following weeks. "Gradually, we began to accept the fact that somehow Ernie was still with us ... I didn't feel comfortable telling the HP engineers." This ghost tale, not entirely over even today, left one reader commenting that, "Many is the day I needed an exorcist far more than a call to Redmond. Exorcism is just the ultimate in outsourcing."
Startups: Rockwell Scientific spin-off ColdWatt makes servers mean and green. Indeed, a machine loaded with ColdWatt's power supplies would need only 25 watts for power conversion and 106 for air conditioning; for a bit of perspective the company claims that a server needing 200 watts of electricity actually consumers 511 watts, with 96 for power conversion and 193 for cooling. View the slideshow Month of Enterprise Startups, with all 15 revealed thus far. Related: Vendors' green messages are loud, not clear.
Quoteworthy: Sarbanes/Oxley and other regulatory requirements aren't just about keeping an eye on wayward CEOs. They're about trying to govern the behavior of this species. Not an easy task. -- Bob Lewis. Six stupid and the nature of adulthood.
The news beat: U.S. ISPs, broadband and VoIP providers come up against the wiretap deadline to prove they can accommodate law-enforcement regulations. An IBM labor union calls for a 15-minute work stoppage this afternoon in protest of layoffs. AMD Developer Center gives a boost to software aimed at multicore chips, while Sun Microsystems licenses multithreading technology to ARM, and Intel settles its copyright suit with a Chinese company.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on May 15, 2007 11:09 AM
May 08, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Details leak on new Santa Rosa laptops
Blogs: Laptop makers Dell, HP, Lenovo, and others planned to release information on their new Santa Rosa based laptops on Wednesday, May 9, but extensive leaks are already circulating those details.
The news beat: Sun will unveil at JavaOne a new Java-based line called JavaFX that promises to take on both Microsoft's Silverlight and AJAX. IBM and Amazon have settled all outstanding patent litigation and also inked a cross-licensing agreement that gives Amazon access to IBM's patents on Web technology. And in great news for users, prices for DRAM continue to drop, sliding below $2 for the first time. These rates aren't likely to last more than the next few months.
Columnists' corner: An EU directive takes data retention for telecommunications a step beyond where governments have ever gone before by adding Web browsing to the list. In Reality Check Ephraim Schwartz looks at possible political, individual, and business ramifications of defining Web browsing as a form of communications.
Posted by Caroline Craig on May 8, 2007 08:30 AM
May 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Is a beleagured Dell on the rebound?
Notes from the field: One letter sure can change a lot. Recall that old phrase DLL Hell? Well, Mr. Cringely (not to be confused with Mr. Crowley), is contemplating an escape from Dell Hell. Actually, "for the last couple of years it's Dell itself that's been trapped in the fiery inferno," Cringe writes. It's more than just those exploding laptops, too. The company lost its top PC maker throne, got blasted for ignoring customers, is struggling to avoid a NASDAQ delisting. "But there are signs the Dellies are making a comeback," Cringe reports. "The results are tangible."
Green IT: In addition to the already-understood benefits, the "outsourced model can provide companies with a potentially greener way to do business, in part thanks to the magic of economies of scale," Ted Samson writes in this Sustainable IT post. NaviSite is one such example; an official claims that the company is "adding value for our customers, both in terms of being environmentally friendly as well as from a business standpoint." Think heating and cooling, increased energy efficiency via DC power and flywheels.
Columnist's corner: Wondering if anybody knows, or cares, what process shrink is, Tom Yager takes it on himself to divulge that information. "If Intel's going to sell nanometers, I figure it's my duty to explain what it means," he writes in So long Silicon. I'll cut to the chase: nanometers, he notes, are not a worthy metric. "Getting Hafnium to the x86 market six to eight months before everybody else, and giving us a first taste of the fruits of the post-silicon era, deserves notice."
The news beat: An IBM executive vice president says great potential resides in linking online worlds such as Second Life and Active Worlds and, as such, calls for a virtual planet, at the company's PartnerWorld conference. Yahoo readies a Web version of Messenger, the IM service. Microsoft buys ScreenTonic for its technology that takes location-based ads to mobile devices. And AMD pre-empts Intel's Santa Rosa launch with a new mobile computing chipset all its own, based on the M690.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on May 3, 2007 04:59 AM
May 02, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Plug-ins for managing APC gear -- get 'em here
Best of the blogs: Two datacenters. Two different cities. Two weeks time. No this is not some geek's retelling of a Dickens novel. Instead, Paul Venezia is deep into APC hardware management. "On the plus side, I wrote several new tools and plug-ins to manage all of the APC gear that went into both sites with Nagios and Cacti," he explains. The Nagios plug-in checks the most pertinent data on the ACRC and ACSC units, as well as the main sensors on the NetBotz units, and the load on each phase on the PDUs.
Columnist's corner: You knew it was a matter to be faced at some point, and that time might be now. Kill IM, or at least control it. "If you're running e-mail and a working phone system in a general office environment, IM is a geek-toy luxury. Simple as that," Oliver Rist espouses. The problem, though, is that plenty of, if not most, sites won't fit into that "general office environment" to which Mr. Rist refers. For many a company IM is already entrenched whether by invite or not. "But you can't ignore it. Ignoring just makes it worse tomorrow."
GripeLine: Unprepared for the overflowing anger many longtime Veritas customers have over what he calls its "ridiculous copy protection maze," Ed Foster reports that "Symantec is forcing them to run." Some of the company's largest customers, in fact, are more than just a little hot under the collar. Businesses "tend to be far more tolerant of having to jump through a few hoops than your average consumer, so this level of frustration with Veritas licensing portal does indeed indicate something is very wrong." Symantec owns Veritas licensing mess.
The news beat: Symantec -- speak of the devil -- is finalizing its next major AV update, code-named Hamlet, and says that next month it will release the public beta schedule. Intel is laying off up to 1,000 people at its New Mexico fab. And Tibco scoops up SpotFire for its enterprise analytics software.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on May 2, 2007 11:20 AM
April 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Young MacBook Pro aging already
Hardware: Still fairly youthful in laptop years, Tom Yager's MacBook Pro is already showing signs of slowing down. Battery life, for one, dropped to about 2 hours. That, and the notebook misreports remaining charge time. It gets worse: writable files destroyed, misfired upgrade offers. MacBook Pro health report November through April. "It's a small adventure in the scheme of things that leaves a faint sour taste that will persist for a day or so at most," Yager writes.
Columnist's corner: Unseen, and seen, forces are working against the digitization of healthcare records, as Dave Margulius points out. Take Kaiser Permanente's effort, for instance, which may have sparked CIO Cliff Dodd's resignation. Margulius very precisely stops short of calling the project a failure, and so will I. But it's not a glowing success, either. Those opposing forces were at play -- doctors and IT among them. "The bigger lesson for CIOs is this: Stick to your faith in technology, pay attention to the people and cultural issues, but know that although you may move the ball forward for humanity, you may not yourself get to enter the promised land." RIP electronic medical records?
The news beat: An official at the GSM association says that