- Waiting for Longhorn
- Easy as ESB
- InfoWorld is looking for a reporter
- Palm drops support for Mac
- Microsoft to refresh Longhorn beta at WinHEC
- Autonomic doesn't mean easy
- Look out J.Lo: Spam-inspired clothes coming to a site near you
- Putting the Accountability in ASP
- Storage industry doing its part
- Wireless to help the wounded
April 29, 2004 | Comments: (0)
Some industry gurus are saying companies should wait to upgrade their desktops and laptops until after Longhorn ships.
That could be a pretty long wait.
In the past as hardware chased after software innovation and sometimes vice versa, systems were good for maybe three years at the outside. Today's thinking and budgets say Windows 2000 and XP and today's crop of Intel processors have a four to five year life expectancy.
John Jordan at CapGemini put this question to me this week:
"What enterprise-grade apps strain either Win 2000/XP or a 1-Ghz processor? Email? Word Documents? Spreadsheets?". The answer is none of the above, which in fact represent a huge percentage of work done on PCs.
On the other hand Longhorn will require new hardware to run Avalon graphics, better audio, as well as new security standards which will eat up lots of computer cycles.
Al Gillin, research director for system software at IDC says it's awfully hard to build and budget for an IT technology roadmap for products that have not been promised for a specific date.
"If a company is not using Windows 2000 or XP then they owe it to themselves to get onto those. They are so much better than a Windows 9x [Widnows 95, Windows 98] platform," Gillin says.
At the personal level, rather than the corporate, the decision may be a bit easier. How do you want to spend your next $2,000, on a new notebook or desktop system or on a flat panel, high definition TV?
Written by Ephraim Schwartz
Posted by Cathleen Moore on April 29, 2004 04:34 PM
April 28, 2004 | Comments: (0)
A couple of you have sent me emails this week, replete with foul language, wondering what the acronym, ESB, stands for. Well, it stands for Enterprise Service Bus, a term for message-brokering software that manages Web services to link distributed systems and funnel application services to where they are needed. Of course, you may have your own varying definition, as does everyone else.
The fact is, the definition of ESB (the term, not the acronym) is a bit of a moving target. But somebody is going to have to iron out a firm definition at some point. Companies such as BEA Systems, JBoss and Software AG plan to get into the ESB game while companies such as Sonic Software already are players.
The ESB, according to Software AG, will make it easier to manage hundreds of Web services in an environment that uses the standard Web services technology for integration. Web services are intended to provide for standard mechanisms for integration as opposed to previous proprietary systems that have been costly, such as EDI (OK, Electronic Data Interchange, for anyone who does not already know).
So for everyone who needs to know, let me repeat that ESB is Enterprise Service Bus (or is it Enterprise Services Bus?). Get used to this acronym. You are going to be hearing it a lot more in coming months.
Posted by Paul Krill on April 28, 2004 03:49 PM
April 28, 2004 | Comments: (0)
InfoWorld is looking for a reporter
Taking a page out of InfoWorld CTO Chad Dickerson's playbook, I thought I'd tap the broad swath of RSS to spread the word that InfoWorld has begun searching for a new reporter.
Here is the job description:
InfoWorld is seeking an ambitious full-time reporter for the IT industry's leading newsweekly and Web site. The reporter will work the beat by cultivating sources in the IT industry and user community. The candidate should be able to break news stories for InfoWorld.com, as well as working on enterprising news and feature articles. We are looking for someone with 2-5 years experience in covering information technology, and a background writing about storage and networking is a plus.
Prospective candidates can expect to write at least one online news story daily, and experience in blogging is a plus.
Anyone interested should send resumes to jobopps@idg.com, but feel free to cc me as well, at tom_sullivan@infoworld.com.
By the by, in case you developers missed Chad's post, find it here.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on April 28, 2004 06:09 AM
April 22, 2004 | Comments: (0)
During the PalmSource developer conference, February 10th and 11th, in San Jose, in response to a question about Palm OS 6.0, called Cobalt at the time, a Palm executive was asked if the new OS would support the Mac. In other words would it support Hot Synch manager.
The short answer is no. I called Palmsource this week to confirm the news that was never officially announced and a here's what their spokesperson told me.
"There was no official announcement. We announced Cobalt OS 6.0 and during the Q&A there was a discussion around Mac support We spoke about a company called MarkSpace. They do a product called the Missing Synch, a third party solution be-tween Palm handhelds and the Mac. We will leave it to them," the spokesperson told me.
Perhaps Palm OEMs will license MarkSpace software but that remains to be seen.
For those Mac users who rightly feel abused PocketMac in conjunction with HP is offering PalmUptrade where existing Mac-based Palm users can trade in their marginalized Palm for an iPaq.
I don't know which hurts more, Apple's disinterest in us Mac users or the possibility of Mac users having to go over to the dark side for their handheld needs.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on April 22, 2004 03:09 PM
April 22, 2004 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft to refresh Longhorn beta at WinHEC
In its ongoing campaign to keep Longhorn front of mind for developers, Microsoft at its WinHec conference next month will release a "refreshed" version of the pre-beta code it handed out at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) last October.
No word yet on exactly what improvements the company will make to this version, which will only be handed out to conference attendees. The first pre-beta release, also only given out to show attendees, was meant to give programmers their first look at the products and something they could start to build applications against.
The finished version of Longhorn, according to company officials, has been pushed back from the second half of 2005 to sometime in 2006. Even then, some observers believe what gets delivered then is a scaled back version of what was originally promised, particularly the WinFS file system.
Some folks are ruminating recently that the company now will not be able to deliver everything it originally promised with Longhorn until the middle of 2007.
-- Ed Scanell (posted by Tom Sullivan)
Posted by Tom Sullivan on April 22, 2004 07:36 AM
April 22, 2004 | Comments: (0)
Autonomic computing, including self-healing systems, won't make the life of IT any easier, at least according to Tom Sheridan, an MIT professor.
I attended a panel yesterday at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, in which Sheridan joined IBM's Alan Ganek, IBM's vice president of autonomic computing, among others.
During the discussion Sheridan said: "Autonomics makes the human role more difficult."
Sheridan explained that human jobs will be more abstract, and will be conducted on a higher level than they are currently. So they will demand more expertise.
IBM's Ganek agreed that more will be required of IT workers, and added that autonomic computing is designed to increase productivity.
"We're not going to automate everybody out of a job, but we have to pay attention to how we'll transform those jobs," said Paul Maglio, who manages human system research at IBM's Almaden labs.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on April 22, 2004 07:20 AM
April 20, 2004 | Comments: (0)
Look out J.Lo: Spam-inspired clothes coming to a site near you
As if we all weren't annoyed enough by spam clogging our email inboxes. Soon you'll be able to spread spam messages personally by adorning your body with spam clothes.
Newsday is reporting that notorious spammer Scott Richter is launching a new clothing line called SpamKing. Richter has been profiled in many articles and TV shows, and is being sued by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer for spam-related crimes.
SpamKing will offer panties, hats, and shirts carrying spam lingo such as "Just opt out," and "Click it."
Naturally, Richter and his OptInRealBig.com "online marketing company" will sell the SpamKing clothes online and plan to use e-mail to advertise.
In other technology-fashion news, Cnet is running a story about Gucci's new carrying case for Apple Computer's iPod. For only $195 you can simultaneously protect and beautify your iPod.
Posted by Cathleen Moore on April 20, 2004 12:15 PM
April 08, 2004 | Comments: (0)
Putting the Accountability in ASP
It's no secret that the software industry as a whole is not exactly known for vendor accountability.
In a bold move, NetSuite said it is backing up its hosted apps with a money back guarantee. That's right, if NetSuite doesn't deliver 99.5 percent uptime, customers will get their money back for that month.
NetSuite has a lot riding on this gamble.
"The risk is if for whatever reason we don't deliver 99.5 percent uptime, we'd have to refund millions of dollars that month," Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite told me.
Now, NetSuite is not the first company to offer a service-level agreement, but whereas most SLAs are on a sliding scale, Nelson positioned this as an all or nothing proposition. If NetSuite doesn't deliver 99.5 percent uptime, customers get all of their money back for that month. Period.
But Nelson added that he is confident that won't happen.
"We're not concerned. We know how to manage our data centers. That's our job," he explained.
Nelson also said that NetSuite has monitored its uptime and gotten an average of 99.7 percent over the last several months and 99.9 percent throughout the last 3 months.
All this makes me wonder if other ASPs will start to actually stand behind their software?
Posted by Tom Sullivan on April 8, 2004 06:20 AM
April 07, 2004 | Comments: (0)
Storage industry doing its part
If you read our book or work in IT, you know that computing architectures are evolving. And I'm here to tell you that the storage industry is doing its part in mak-ing the datacenter adaptable and extensible.
Here at SNW in the valley of the sun, and the place I once called home, I'm seeing first hand the phenomenal maturation of storage networking equipment.
My colleague Mario agrees. Every vendor we talk to is designing products for customer needs. Additionally, they are taking the onus upon themselves to achieve interoperability. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. Every industry does that. Right? Wrong! Not this industry.
Back in September 2001, while at Red Herring magazine, which is rumored to be re-launching in print later this year, I wrote about how the storage titans would rather fight then interoperate. I was right back then, but ever since then they've changed their tune. No. I'm not taking any credit at all for that shift. Instead I'd like to give Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) props for their work here. Yes 'props' is slang and is short for 'proper respect.' And no, I'm not giving them credit just because I'm at their show, eating their food and using their wireless LAN. Rather I'm giving them credit because they've played an important role in bringing warring warlords together.
Each show, which is twice a year, SNIA demonstrates (literally) the progress they've made in creating a standard way to manage formerly interoperable systems. On Monday, SNIA announced that 14 vendors have had products certified to be compliant with Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S), the proposed standard that permits third-party software products perform simple management of multi-vendor arrays- something that was impossible when I wrote that Red Herring article.
I'm done with the praise part of this entry, because in my opinion there is little more SNIA can do to make this 3-year-in-the-making interoperability stick.
I talked to Brian Truskowski, general manager of IBM's TotalStorage Open Soft-ware group, yesterday about interoperability and he was pleased with the progress of SNIA and shot down any implication that the acceptance of this whole thing is taking entirely too long.
I disagree. And again it isn't SNIA's fault. Vendors are involved with SNIA, but they aren't working too hard in submitting proposals for additional functionality. As it stands today, SMI-S is good, but it isn't great.
I'll stop that rant and go back to back-slapping.
The vendors are hearing customers on the cost and flexibility front. As I said earlier, each one I talk to has products out, in progress or planned that are lower in cost and can be modified up or down depending on the customer's need. For example, IBM and HP both made announcement this week about products that address those concerns.
Hmmmmm. Now I'm thinking that maybe all the vendor focus on bringing the cost of adoption down and presenting more options is yet another way to detract users' attention from the still lacking interoperability. Hell, there is always Fall SNW to prove me wrong.
Posted by Scott Tyler Shafer on April 7, 2004 11:37 AM
April 02, 2004 | Comments: (0)
One reason I never get burned out after lots of years covering high tech is
because of technology like this.
InHand Electronics out of Rockville, Maryland, just received a contract from the U.S. Army to develop a Personal Information Carrier [PIC] which will embed all of a soldiers medical history, including x-rays, inside of a soldier's dog tag.
The dog tag will also have a wireless component, most likely RFID, so that a medic in the field can download relevant medical data like allergies or blood type, of a wounded combatant who might be unable to speak or move.
Once the soldier is evacuated the dog tag, through a built-in USB port, can be connected to another system to view x-rays and any other medical details not previously downloaded.
Andrew Girson, InHand CEO stressed that this is an R&D effort at the moment.
InHand is also the infrastructure provider to a handheld product from VoxTec, based in Annapolis, MD., called the Phraselator. Not the most elegant name but the idea which was again developed for the army but with non-military uses to follow, is that it holds over 15,000 phrases in any one of 50 languages.
I find stuff like this fascinating. But then I also scan the science news in publications on almost a daily basis waiting for the first hint of someone, somewhere, discovering the technology to build a transporter, ala Star Trek.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on April 2, 2004 11:17 AM
TOP STORIES
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
- Do you have the power to resolve technical issues with one call?
- Take control of your content- leverage Microsoft SharePoint
- Keeping the E-Mail Flowing
- How Does Your IT Help Desk Measure Up?
- Best Practices for the Service Desk
- Discover How to Provide Anytime, Anywhere IT Support
