InfoWorld Daily | Tom Sullivan

SOA vendors and value, part 2

Tom Sullivan — 2008-05-15T10:49:28-08:00

Continuing his discussion about SOA vendors' misguided focus, David Linthicum asserts that integration is indeed important. "You bet it is. But it's not architecture, it's a part of architecture ... the more holistic concept is architecture and you can't do integration without understanding the architectural context," he writes in Part 2: SOA Vendors focus too much on integration and not enough on architecture. Linthicum suspects that, based on past reactions, this notion won’t be welcomed by most SOA vendors. Follow this link to Part 1.... READ MORE

Daily news beat for May 15, 2008

Tom Sullivan — 2008-05-15T09:32:27-08:00

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn charges Yahoo with acting irrationally and losing the faith of both its shareholders and Microsoft. For that, Icahn says he is taking on Yahoo and plans to nominate 10 candidates to replace all incumbent member of Yahoo's board. Related: Icahn's letter to Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock and Special report: Microsoft's bid for Yahoo. In what some analysts are calling a "completive response" to Microsoft's Silverlight and Sun's JavaFX rich Internet application (RIA) platforms, Adobe refreshes Flash Player 10, replete with new 3D capabilities that set it apart from the rivals. An open source project issues its... READ MORE

The many, many stats behind green IT

Tom Sullivan — 2008-05-15T07:30:21-08:00

If you or someone at your company is not yet considering green IT solutions, then Ted Samson shares some numbers that just might make you reconsider. $11.5 billion, for instance. That's McKinsey and Company's total estimated energy bill for datacenters in 2010. Here's another: $1,870. That might appear to be mere peanuts when compared to the first number, but it's actually McKinsey's estimated annual operating expense for powering and cooling a single midtier server in a tier III datacenter. And those two are just the beginning of a rather long list. As Samson explains in Green IT numbers don't lie,... READ MORE

InfoWorld Daily Podcast

Tom Sullivan — 2008-05-15T07:22:43-08:00

A language for the new computing era

Tom Sullivan — 2008-05-15T04:11:18-08:00

Sun's Fortress, if it succeeds, could become the programming language for the new computing era, in which low-cost commodity processors clustered together over high-speed networks have made HPC accessible for nearly anyone. "If work on the project continues apace, Fortress could very easily become one of the most important developments in computer science since parallel processing itself," Neil McAllister finds in this installment of our new Fatal Exception blog. But don't plan on writing your next major business application on Fortress just yet.... READ MORE

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Yager: How I became spam kingpin, went legit, turned detective

Tom Sullivan — 2008-05-14T11:16:14-08:00

Picking up his earlier first-person account of a Leopard Server root exploit, Tom Yager begins by stating that, "I did slam the door on the ClamAV exploiter, and close observation for a couple of weeks allayed my concerns that any lasting hole had been blown in my OS X Leopard Server's security." Yager was happy with himself. But then came May, thus far an unkind month. Indeed, one night he walked by his server rack and noticed the CPU activity lights were pegged when they should have been idle. "It was at this point that I knew I was under... READ MORE

Daily news beat for May 14, 2008

Tom Sullivan — 2008-05-14T09:20:26-08:00

Is the browser doomed? As highly interactive, visually rich experiences replace the limited graphics and static Web pages of yesteryear, and the Web becomes the preferred platform for enterprise application delivery, Neil McAllister wonders just that. He predicts that a new kind of browser, one that combines the existing Web with fresh capabilities based on new tools, is likely to emerge. Unfortunately, Red Hat's Fedora 9 looks to be too much of a blast from the past. In short: the distribution may be robust, but the installer needs to learn to play better with others, particularly for anyone who wants... READ MORE

The quiet and green rack o' dreams

Tom Sullivan — 2008-05-14T07:56:26-08:00

What with rack servers getting louder with each generation, Tom Yager considers noise to be the primary governor of his workflow. "There are things that I set out to save: My ears and my power draw," Yager explains in It's quiet, it's green, it's the rack o' my dreams. That brought him to GizMac and its XRackPro2 which is not a sound-isolating cabinet but, rather, a sealed rack enclosure that reduces noise, as Yager found, with varying effectiveness depending on what’s generated inside. "I packed an 8-core Xserve and two 16-core machines in a 6U XRackPro2. When I powered them... READ MORE

Making the case for business social software

Tom Sullivan — 2008-05-14T07:26:55-08:00

Jive Software's Clearspace 2.0, in the words of reviewer Mike Heck, extends collaboration outside the firewall, gives users more customization options, and adds project management. "Even with all these admirable changes, Jive still faced a problem: how to convince users to purchase an arguably better social product when they may already have document-oriented Microsoft SharePoint Server with its own blogs and wikis," Heck writes. "The answer: if you can't beat 'em, join 'em -- by offering SharePoint integration." Jive Software made a number of changes to differentiate Clearspace 2.0 from rival enterprise blog and wiki offerings, Heck explains, adding that... READ MORE

InfoWorld Daily Podcast

Tom Sullivan — 2008-05-14T07:03:24-08:00