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The InformationWeek October 2008 Archive « September 2008 | Main | November 2008 » |
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Persistence Is The Browsers' Most Persistent Problem
Over on his Tecosytems blog, Redmonk principal analyst Stephen O'Grady picks up a conversation that he and I first batted back and forth on Twitter. Twitter, with its 140-character limit to each post, can cramp even the simplest of dialogs. Take a complex topic like offline persistence of anything (a single page, data, applications, etc.) in a browser and I'm glad he took it to the blogosphere. Sometimes only a blog will do.
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Mobile News Roundup
It's Friday again, and this week was filled with Motorola backing Android while Sprint dissed it. Qik came to the BlackBerry, Verizon Wireless had a good quarter, and we learned that Twitter could be a tool for terrorists. As always, there were a few stories that flew under the radar, and I'm here to help shed some light on them.
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VC Drought? 70 Million Exceptions To The Rule
Anxiety is high in Silicon Valley over an anticipated decline in VC funding, but investment money hasn't dried up yet. In the past few days, a handful of startups have pulled in $70 million.
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Green Politics 2008: Troy The Turbine Builder
Now that Joe The Plumber has a manager, I thought I'd give equal time to Troy the Turbine Builder. United Steelworkers member Troy Galloway, in this video posted on a site operated by a group calling itself Cleantech and Green Business for Obama, details his new career in Ebensburg Borough, Pa., building wind turbines for Gamesa Corporación Tecnológica, a Spanish company with corporate offices in Langhorne, Pa.
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Will Verizon Wireless Give Away The BlackBerry Storm For Free?
Verizon Wireless' U.K. partner, Vodafone, recently announced that it will give the BlackBerry Storm to users for free if they sign up for new contracts. Can Verizon Wireless afford to do the same thing?
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Drupal Takes Home 2008 Overall Open Source CMS Award
Drupal cleaned up for the second year in a row in the 2008 Open Source CMS Awards, taking home both the Overall Open Source CMS Award and the Best Open Source PHP CMS Award. This marks the first time in which a content management system has ever won the overall award in back-to-back years.
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'Linux-Haters Blog' Signs Off
As of last Saturday, the infamous Linux Hater's Blog has signed off. Seekers of curmudgeonly wisdom about Linux cleverly disguised as flaming bile will have to look elsewhere. And, strangely enough, I already miss him.
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NIST Seeks New Hash Algorithm
NIST is wrapping up accepting submissions for a new cryptographic one-way hash algorithm today. NIST's competition follows a tradition of peer review, public discussion, and acceptance of algorithms that brought us DES, SHA, and AES. The selection process won’t be complete until 2012, but final selection should addresses weaknesses in the hash algorithms used today.
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Verizon Wireless Teaches Retail Reps How To Bash The G1
Not one to sit on its laurels, Verizon Wireless is taking the interest in T-Mobile's G1 Android phone seriously by providing its sales reps with ammunition to shoot it down. Another list of "talking points" has been circulated, and it tells us what Verizon really thinks of the G1.
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Obama's Online Answer Center Fields Tough Questions
Everyone is worried about the economy. But surprisingly, the economy isn't the subject of the top three questions people are asking online at an "answer center" run by Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Visitors are most interested in whether Obama is a Christian and a patriot, and they want to know his position on women's issues.
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Apple: No Opera Mini For The iPhone
Opera Mini and Opera Mobile are highly capable browsers for mobile phones. Opera, which also makes a full desktop browser for both Windows and Apple machines, created a version of Opera Mini that will run on the iPhone. Too bad Apple won't allow Opera to offer it through the iPhone App Store.
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SSDs Are Not Confusing
Seems like every vendor I speak with is laying out its solid-state disk (SSD) strategy, and almost all say they're trying to help the customer through this confusing platform change. It's not confusing.
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Cyber Attacks Targeting UK National Infrastructure
A key U.K. IT security defense leader says that continuous cyberattacks are targeting U.K. businesses that work in the nation's critical infrastructure.
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Motorola Causing A Ruckus
Motorola sure gave us some interesting news today. The quarterly loss of nearly $400 million and thousands of layoffs always jump out at you, but, digging a little deeper, I couldn't help but wonder where Symbian fits into Moto's plans.
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Google Updates Chrome To Version 0.3.154.9
Google on Wednesday released a new version of its Chrome browser, the third Chrome beta release.
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Crybabies Emerge After Wal-Mart G1 Discount Announced
Remember how ticked off people were when Apple dropped the price of the iPhone from $600 to $400 last year? People cried foul in droves. In light of Wal-Mart's announcement that it's going to sell the Android phone for $31 less than it costs at T-Mobile stores, people are complaining.
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Dell, Facebook, And Google Join Dreamforce Love Fest
The number of technology vendors involved in Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference next week is impressive. Salesforce is nowhere the size of Oracle or Microsoft, but it undoubtedly has a strong "partner ecosystem," as the vendors like to say. Michael Dell will be there, plus Google and Facebook execs, and many small software companies hawking their wares. So what's behind the rally behind Salesforce.com?
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XenServer 5.0 In The Lab
The world was a different place the last time we ran a full review of XenServer. In July 2007, we called XenSource's XenEnterprise 3.04 a virtual bargain and suggested that it was rough around the edges but a viable ESX alternative for smaller shops. It's not so rough anymore. You might even say it has smooth edges.
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IBM Fined $900,000 For Failing To Backup
The Dallas Morning News reported that the state of Texas is fining IBM $900,000 for failing to make timely backups as part of an $863 million outsourcing contract. Gov. Rick Perry also suspended the transfer of additional state records into the IBM system, claiming the new system puts state agency data at risk.
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Green Metrics: Measure By Measure
You can manage what you can measure. You can tame what you can name. However you choose to say it, it's becoming abundantly clear that any efforts to go green must begin with accurate and actionable measurements of energy consumption.
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'Motorolandroid': Another Open Source Proving Ground
Even if there won't be any Android phones from Motorola for at least a year, it might well be one of the best things that's happened to Motorola in a long time. It also may well be the best thing that could have happened to Android, since it'll put the OS right in the line of fire of the non-smartphone-buying public.
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Deep Linking Now Possible With YouTube Vidoes
Sharing videos via YouTube is what the fun is all about. Sometimes, however, the "good part" is somewhere in the middle of the video, and you have to sit through minutes of tedium to reach the money shot. No longer. Google has created a way for people to link to specific times within their videos, meaning you can jump straight to the action.
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Will Microsoft Shake Up Cloud Computing SLAs?
For Microsoft, which announced its cloud computing platform this week, it seems like service level agreements don't just mean uptime. That thinking could shake up the industry.
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Going Laptopless: MicroPersuasion On iPhone As Notebook Replacement
Ever since my InformationWeek cover story, "Is The Smartphone Your Next Computer?," I've been getting pinged by people telling me their tales of going "laptopless." (Can I use that word in a family blog?) Steve Rubel, the popular MicroPersuasion blogger and public-relations executive at Edelman Digital, spoke with me for the story and told me why he's tilting away from the notebook and relying increasingly on his iPhone. Here's our full interview.
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Motorola: No Android Phones For A Year
Just when it seemed Motorola was on the brink of turning things around, reality had to intrude. Motorola reported its third quarter earnings today. The company suffered a deep loss of $397 million. Worse than that was a comment made by Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha. He said there will be no Android phones from Motorola until the holiday season of 2009.
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Is The Cloud The End Of Microsoft?
As InformationWeek covers Microsoft's revelations at its Professional Developer Conference this week, it's becoming clear that Microsoft's top brass know they aren't in the same business they were just a few years ago. So is this the transitive stage that spells the end of Microsoft's dominance of the software industry?
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IBM's Enterprise Content Management Push
Content management systems may not be the first thing that comes to mind at the mention of IBM's name, but this week it's being made clear that they play a critical part in IBM's Information On Demand strategy.
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Are Bots On Twitter Hurting Overall System Performance?
If you use the "real-time short messaging service" Twitter, you know that over the last year there have been many performance issues. So many, in fact, that users have created a name for the outages, called the "fail whale." I started to poke around and began to wonder if bots running on the Twitter network could be causing some of the system performance issues on the service.
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Imation Finds Scary Data On "Recertified" Tapes
Last month I wrote about my general misgivings about selling used data tapes for reuse. My New Yorker's general skepticism left me dubious that the few dollars I got for sending a box of tapes via UPS or FedEx to Joe the used tape salesman was worth the risk that some of my data might make it to Christopher the identity thief. Today I got a press release from Imation reporting that they purchased around 100 "recertified" tapes from "leading recertifyers as found on Google" and found recoverable data on 30% of them.
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Consumers Cutting Cell Phone Spending
Has the global economic slowdown made you change your cell phone plans? You may not be alone, as a new poll for GetJar shows that more than 75% of respondents are planning to cut back on their bill, or wait to upgrade or buy a new phone.
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12 Easy Ways To Cut Your Company's Tech Costs Now!
These days, everyone's talking about saving money on technology, but where do you start? To help, bMighty.com has put together a slide show with a dozen practical ways to shave a few bucks off your IT budget without impacting productivity.
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Hackers Crack Open, Unlock The G1 Android Phone
Well, that didn't take too long. A coven of crafty coders have used their wily skills to break the software chains tethering the HTC G1 Android phone to T-Mobile's network. There is a trade-off, however, and it's a big one.
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AT&T Finally Offers Free Wi-Fi To The iPhone (For Real This Time!)
Today I received a text message from AT&T. It was an official announcement that I can now begin using AT&T Wi-Fi hot spots for free in locations such as participating Starbucks. Nice of AT&T to get on the ball six months after news of the service first leaked out.
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OpenOffice.Org 3 Downloads: Windows Way In The Lead
In what probably comes as a surprise only to people who haven't been following trends in open source recently, the vast majority of people who've grabbed OpenOffice.org 3.0 in its official release are Windows users. Out of 3-plus million downloads in the first week or so, almost 2.5 million of those were for the Win32 edition of OO.o.
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Google's Android Army Gathers More Soldiers
HTC had better look out. Motorola also has chosen Android to be its savior. But these are not the only companies looking at the open mobile platform from Google. OpenMoko, maker of the Linux-based FreeRunner, also is eying Android, as is Asus (yes, the maker of PCs). Can Android take over the mobile world?
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Green Storage Is More Than Just Green Drives
Most, if not all, the hard drive manufacturers have come out with green drives; drives that spin down or turn off. There are two problems with counting on green drives to reduce your power consumption; first, they are only one component in the storage solution, and second, there has to be intelligence for them to be used optimally.
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Don't Hold Your Breath Waiting For Turn-By-Turn Directions On The iPhone
At first glance, the iPhone has all the ingredients needed to support turn-by-turn directions. It runs GPS. It runs Google Maps. It has audio output and a speaker. So why doesn't the iPhone give you real-time turn-by-turn directions? The answer, I think, is that turn-by-turn directions are more complicated to deliver than they seem to be. Much as I want my iPhone to tell me where to turn when I'm driving, I'm not optimistic that we'll see that capability anytime soon.
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Motorola Is Going To Bet The Farm On Android
Motorola is planning a massive overhaul of its mobile phone business. Among the changes? Layoffs and a complete re-focusing of its midrange handsets, where most of its sales are. Moving forward, Motorola is going to bank on Android to be its go-to mobile phone platform.
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AMD Releases Green Report
AMD today released its eighth annual Global Climate Protection Plan, incorporating for the first time the environmental impact its suppliers have on its finished goods.
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SocNets May Boost Insecurity
A new survey of IT managers shows that heavy use of social networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and instant messaging may be strongly correlated to a higher number of security incidents.
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Bitrix Site Manager Launches Two New Versions
Following just a few months after the release of Site Manager 7.0, Bitrix last week announced two new editions of Site Manager intended for sites that need to support heavy traffic and e-commerce.
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What Microsoft Didn't Say About Windows Azure
After hemming and hawing for months over its cloud strategy, Microsoft has finally unveiled Azure Services Platform, a set of hosted software services that, once available, can be used to build and run applications in the cloud. Microsoft's grand plan, however, leaves key questions unanswered.
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Edit Office Docs On The iPhone
As wonderful as the iPhone 3G is, there are still a few drawbacks to it for the enterprise user. It looks like we'll soon be able to cross off "editing Office documents," as DataViz will soon be bringing its documents app to Apple's handset.
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Windows Azure: Help Wanted In The Blue Sky Mine
Well, there was at least one surprise in the first day of the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference: Microsoft's new cloud OS is named Azure, not the rumored Stratus. Many of the other Azure foundation pieces-parts are predictable adaptations and evolutions of existing Microsoft products and services, which is both good news and bad.
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Spectacular Rally Before Black Tuesday Anniversary Doesn't Get Investors Out Of The Woods
Consumer confidence has hit 40-year lows. Home prices fell for the 20th consecutive month. Unemployment is expected to rise. So, what has that done to U.S. stocks?
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iPhone 2.2 Images Hit The Web
The iPhone 2.2 firmware update is on its way, and it's a meaty one, with goodies for Google Maps users and podcast fans. Beta users have been posting images of the Google Maps upgrades, with added support for Street View and walking and transit directions, and they look sweet.
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Could Health Care IT Get A Boost Next Year?
There's a lot of uncertainty out there in general when it comes to the economy, next week's elections, and other unknowns, but when it comes to the health care sector, the uncertainty runs a bit deeper, especially when it comes to investments in IT.
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Renewable Cisco Gets Green Pats
Cisco Systems and Intel were among those feted at the annual National Renewable Energy Marketing Conference, held this week in Denver. Of these, special honors should go to Cisco for its emphasis on absolute reduction of greenhouse gases, rather than through offsets.
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Want A G1 Android Phone At A Discount? Try Wal-Mart
Retail discounting giant Wal-Mart is set to begin selling the HTC G1 Android phone for $30 less than it costs at T-Mobile USA stores. If you wanted to get the G1 on the cheap, looks like Wal-Mart is the way to go.
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Microsoft PDC Day 2: Office, Windows, And Live Mesh
Today, Microsoft unveils Windows 7 and talks about the future of Office and Live Mesh. I'm watching the keynote, and will blog about it here. Will Windows 7 be better than Vista? Does Live Mesh matter? Read it here.
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Windows Azure: The End Of Software?
Forget the marketing hype, Windows Azure isn't the latest Microsoft operating system. It's a business strategy. One that shows Redmond believes the days in which it can make fat profits from software alone are numbered.
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Survey Shows Disconnect On IT Policy
Cisco follows up on its survey on data leakage, which I already wrote about, and an analysis of policy effectiveness. There isn't too much surprising in the findings, but the results continue to highlight the need for sound security policy management processes in organizations and, more important, that the policies need to be communicated to employees.
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Which Google Android Apps Are G1 Users Downloading?
Want to know who's downloading what for their HTC G1 Android phones? Medialets, a company which hooks iPhone and Android apps into mobile advertising, has an early look at the most popular Google phone applications. Here's the data.
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Canonical's Next (And Hardest) Steps
Look forward, not back. That's a philosophy Mark Shuttleworth wants to bring to Ubuntu, and by extension to the rest of Linux as well. In a conference call on Monday, right before the release of 8.10 at the end of this month (happy Halloween!), he laid out what's in that release right now and some high-level goals for the future.
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Best Buy Wants A Whopping $660 For BlackBerry Bold
If you had any desire to snag yourself a BlackBerry Bold free of contract, you may want to think twice. The unlocked, unsubsidized version of the Bold is on sale at BestBuy.com for $660.
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Google Adds Calendar Notifications To Gmail
If you're a user of Gmail, you've probably taken a peek at Gmail Labs. Labs is where Google engineers give us the ability to test out new features for Gmail that aren't fully finalized. Now, Google has added gadgets that allow users to view their Google Calendar and their Google Docs from within Gmail.
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Microsoft Issues Emergency Advisory
Just last week we warned admins and end users alike that they'd better apply the patch released last week in security update MS08-067. Today, Microsoft warned users that exploits that target the vulnerability are circulating in the wild. Hate to say it: Told You So.
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More Cloud Computing Startups
The list of emerging companies with cloud services and infrastructure products keeps growing. Since we compiled InformationWeek's guide to 20 Cloud Computing Startups in September, eight more have drifted in.
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How Many G1s Does HTC Expect To Sell?
Remember all the fuss about how many G1 units would be sold? Well, The San Jose Mercury News landed a sit-down interview with the CEO of HTC, and he shed some light on how many the company is expecting to sell.
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Cutting Through E-Voting Debate Semantics
The United Kingdom's government said unequivocably that the U.K. will not now, nor in the foreseeable future, adopt electronic voting.
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Spooky Predictions For Wall Street
It's anybody's guess what U.S. stocks will do this week. Investors have acted with all the reliability of a ball on a roulette wheel since the end of September.
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Microsoft's 'Black Screen of Death' Patched...By Hackers
Last week, Chinese hackers were posting fake links promising to fix Microsoft's "black screen of death" -- the links lead to malware that attempts to attack visitors' computers.
But it appears that at least one link that Chinese hackers have posted is the real deal -- a "patch" to repair the "black screen of death."
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Why Windows 7 Doesn't Compute
I know this is nit-picky, especially when there are so many other important things to focus on -- like faster boot times and files searches that take less than a leap year. But here's what I want to know: Isn't "Windows 7" a gross misnomer as the name of Vista's successor? If we're not gonna use a year as the numerical designation in the new operating system's name, then aren't we at least up to nine or 10? (Or maybe 12?)
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The PCI Protection Racket
A hotel operator says his point-of-sale vendor is using PCI as an excuse to force expensive upgrades to POS equipment.
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Android's Mobile Email An Epic Fail?
Uh oh. Reports are pouring in from users of the HTC G1 Android phone and the news is not good. Users are saying that the mobile e-mail client fails to retrieve e-mail and reports mysterious "connection errors." Many complain that mobile e-mail doesn't work at all on the G1. Google, T-Mobile and HTC, you'd better fix this one fast...
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Microsoft PDC Live Blog
Every few years, Microsoft hosts a big conference, the Professional Developers Conference, to announce the next versions of Windows and .Net, among other things. This year should be called the cloud PDC, and I'll be blogging about it in this post.
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Go-oo: OpenOffice.org, Reloaded
For those of you who've been downloading the OpenOffice.org 3.0 betas and release candidates, there's an alternate build of OO.o that's well worth your attention: Go-oo.
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Are 'Green' Drives Really Green?
The storage industry is often guilty of jumping on the bandwagon without giving the architecture much thought. We see this in solid state disk, data deduplication, and green drives. Are users really going to see decreased power consumption by deploying green drives? If so, is it going to be worth the effort of replacing your current systems?
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Green Computing? Offset This
Is there anything positive to be said about "carbon neutral" computing? The premise of carbon neutrality is to achieve net zero carbon emissions by balancing a measured amount of carbon released with an equivalent amount sequestered or offset.
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iPhone Gets Google Earth, Street Views On The Way
Good news for iPhone users this morning. First, Google announced a free version of its Google Earth application for the iPhone. Second, it appears that firmware 2.2 for the iPhone will support Street Views in the Google Maps application. Together, these make the iPhone's mapping capabilities a lot more interactive.
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T-Mobile G1 'Android' Smartphone Has Serious Security Flaw
As if headlines haven't been bad enough lately, reading the New York Times' story on Saturday about the security flaw in Google's Android software didn't help cheer me up very much.
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Sprint: Android Ain't For Us. Not Yet, Anyway
Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said that Android, as it is today, is not "good enough to put the Sprint brand on it." I suppose that will make the next gathering of the Open Handset Alliance, of which Sprint is a part, a little awkward.
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Windows Vista SP2: Mid-Life Crisis Management
Poor Vista. Interest in Windows 7 and the new Windows Strata "cloud OS" has left the current version of Windows getting little attention. Microsoft VP Mike Nash pulled customers back into the present with the announcement that Vista Service Pack 2 will be released to a select group for testing just two days before Halloween.
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VMware, Citrix Work To Keep The Good Numbers Rolling
Both companies exceeded the Street's expectations last quarter. Now... how to close '08 with a bang?
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The Startup Culture: Silicon Valley Versus New York
One of the questions I'm asked most often on both coasts is "What's the difference between the startup culture on the East Coast and those on the West Coast?" I'd like to share some of my thoughts on the differences. I have noticed that both coasts have very active startup communities with events on nearly every weeknight.
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Mobile News Roundup
It was a big week in the mobile world. Google's Android finally launched, the BlackBerry App Store surfaced, we finally got a firm release date on the BlackBerry Bold, the Symbian Foundation got its leader, and Apple sold a gajillion iPhones. There was plenty of other news that we weren't able to fully cover, so here's my stab at it.
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Clean Tech Skirts The Financial Meltdown
Years from now, when their great-grandchildren ask "what did you do during the Great Financial Meltdown Of Ought-Eight?," the answer clean tech investors and technologists may give is, "what meltdown?"
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NAS Clusters, How Should You Couple?
A split decision surrounds the use of tightly coupled or loosely coupled solutions. There aren't enough implemented cases yet available to make a determination on the best approach; the deployments that have been made aren't stretching either method to the point a real determination can be made.
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Measuring Data Center Power Efficiency
Data centers consume massive amounts of energy. In a Forbes commentary in August, Kenneth Brill, executive director of the Uptime Institute (which monitors data center uptime), said the number of servers in data centers in the United States has grown from 5 million in 2000, to 10 million in 2005, to a projected 15 million in 2010.
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ICANN Opens Comments On gTLD Creation
ICANN, the organization that manages the technical aspect of the DNS, among other things, has opened up a 45-day public comment period on the process for requesting a new generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) such as .com, .net, and .gov. The comment period is the next step along the path of adding more gTLD's to DNS. If you are involved with DNS, or work for a global or national brand, you want to pay attention to these developments.
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No Software Keyboard Support In Android Until 2009
Right now the only Android phone in the market has a physical QWERTY keyboard for composing messages, but lacks a software keyboard such as that found on the iPhone. The good news is that a software keyboard is on the way. The bad news is it won't be ready until next year.
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AMD Holds Its Green Up To The Light
AMD next week is set to release its annual Global Climate Protection Plan, its eighth to date. The environmental report is remarkable in its candor, according to those who've read advanced copies. In particular, its disclosure -- best guesses, really -- of how big its carbon footprint is when the entire product supply chain is considered. It's a task that relatively few manufacturers bother to take.
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Google Founders Buy Fighter Jet
Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and Google CEO Eric Schmidt must have new plans to attack the competition, or they just like to fly really, really fast. Whatever the reason, they recently bought a fighter jet.
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Isn't 'Open DRM' A Contradiction?
"Open DRM", a contradiction? Not according to the Marlin Developer Community. This consortium claims it's created an "open" digital rights management scheme, one that also allows a degree of sharing and movement of content. But under it all isn't DRM still just ... DRM?
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Netbooks Slam Shut On Vista Sales
Revenue from Microsoft's key Windows franchise grew just 2% in the most recent quarter as more PC buyers opted for smaller, more nimble, netbook-style devices that don't need a fat OS like Vista. Does Redmond have an answer for this trend?
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Pulse Of Silicon Valley: High Hopes For Tech Amid Sagging Economy
You could call it denial, you could say some people are irrationally trying to wish the bad stock market away. But here's another side I saw this week, during a swing through Silicon Valley where I met with 10 pretty together tech companies: There's some serious -- albeit cautious -- optimism out there that now is precisely the time customers will realize they should invest in technologies which will make their businesses more efficient.
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Google Goes Crazy With Emoticons For GMail >;-)
Like them or not, emoticons have transcended chat rooms and now appear in Tweets, e-mails, text messages, and even advertisements. They've taken on a life of their own at conveying a message, thought, or, ahem, emotion. Google code writers have decided to enhance the number of emoticons that are available to GMail users, and many of them are animated.
Continue reading "Google Goes Crazy With Emoticons For GMail >;-)..."
Amazon: Deserving Of Wall Street's Punishment?
With four tech titans -- Amazon, EMC, Microsoft, and Sun -- hitting their 52-week lows on Thursday, Oct. 23, and a bunch of others coming awfully close, I wondered in my last post if we should have called it Tech Black Thursday. In fairness, I didn't bother to do the same scan on some of Wall Street's other recent and horrific days. So, Thursday may not have been unique. But, at least in the case of Amazon, one has to wonder if Wall Street has it right.
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Tech's Black Thursday? Four Tech Titans Hit 52-Week Low. Others Come Very Close.
With the stock market going through the ups and downs that it's going through and with Warren Buffet saying "now's the time to be greedy" when it comes to stocks, several people have asked me which tech stocks might be a good buy. In my 20s, I caused several people to lose money based on bad stock advice and never gave anyone advice again. I still don't. But I poked around anyway and discovered that on Thursday, Oct. 23, four major tech brands hit their 52-week lows and others came very close. How often does that happen?
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Microsoft's Emergency Patch
I've received a number of e-mails, and held a few conversations, today with admins upset with Microsoft's atypical out-of-cycle patch. Newsflash: This was the right thing for the company to do.
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Storwize Boosts Compression Appliances
All the attention that storage punditry, including this humble reporter, has given data deduplication in the past few years has pushed that old, reliable data-reduction technology compression toward the dust bin of used up technology in the minds of many storage users. That's too bad, as loss-less compression is still an important data-reduction tool. One vendor, Storwize, has made a nice little business for itself making NAS compression appliances and now it's claiming each appliance can handle 600 MB/s of traffic and archive 15:1 compression.
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Arista Networks Trademarks 'Cloud Networking'
Arista Networks made news with the appointments of Andy Bechtolsheim as chairman and chief development officer and Jayshree Ullal as president and CEO, along with a name change (from Arastra) and three new customers. Easily lost in all that was the little trademark symbol attached to "cloud networking," the term it's begun using to describe its thrust.
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SpringCM Announces Upgrades, Free Records Management
SpringCM made two significant announcements this week -- an upgrade to its hosted content management system and free access to its records management tools for customers for the next two years.
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Movement In The Stationary Fuel-Cell Market
After noting recently that there was movement again in the portable fuel cell market, a reader dryly noted that we'd been down that road before and come to a dead end. More like an uneventful drive with no scenery and nothing but rest stops, I'd say. Regardless, there is a parallel road that isn't examined quite as often in the press: stationary fuel cells.
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Microsoft Releases Critical Out-Of-Band Update
Because of the seriousness of a remote code execution vulnerability recently discovered in the Windows Server Service, Microsoft has released a fix outside of its normal "Patch Tuesday."
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Amazon Adds Windows To Its Cloud Computing
The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, is now ready to run Windows and the Microsoft SQL Server database. Both Windows and SQL Server operation will be in beta mode, according to Jeff Barr, senior Web services evangelist.
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Facebook To Android: You Don't Really Matter
In an off-the-record conversation that suddenly went very much on-the-record, Facebook developers were harshing on Google's brand new little darling of a mobile platform. One of the Facebook employees went so far as to call Android vaporware. Don't expect to see a Facebook client for the G1 in the near future.
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Google Improves Mobile Gmail
One of the overarching themes of the G1 reviews is how good the Gmail integration is. Don't worry if you can't or won't get the Android phone because Google has improved Gmail for BlackBerry and J2ME phones.
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Cloud Computing's Skeptics And Critics
We hear a lot from cloud computing's true believers, those who are convinced it's the next big thing in business technology. But, there are two sides to every story, and the naysayers are sounding off.
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Android, iPhone Not Threats, Says Microsoft
It looks like Microsoft thinks the competition from Google and Apple in the mobile space isn't really much of a competition. In an interview with TechRadar, Microsoft's John Curran unsurprisingly sees Windows Mobile being the most successful out of the three in the next three years.
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Gates Startup's Secret Plan: Moist And Chewy Computers
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has launched a stealth company called BGC3. No word so far on its purpose or future direction. However, a quick scan of government and Internet records reveals several interesting tidbits.
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Lawyers To IT: ESI Is Your Baby
Fifty percent more attorneys than last year say IT has responsibility for developing and enforcing policies around electronically stored information. That's a good thing.
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Hard Times = The End Of Open, Says 'Cult Of The Amateur' Author
Not long ago I wrote that hard economic times could be a good thing for open source. Andrew Keen, author of Cult of the Amateur, seems to be arguing the opposite: that hard times will knock all of this open source / open content silliness out of people's heads.
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Google Adds Video Editing Capabilities To Picasa
Just two weeks ago, Google made it easier to share video clips with family and friends with the updated Picasa 3 software. Now it has gone a step further and has given Picasa 3 users the ability to edit their videos before posting them.
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New FTC Rules Governing Health Providers Go Into Effect Nov. 1
Are you ready? In about a week, new so-called "Red Flag Rules" from the FTC go into effect, aimed at curbing medical identity theft.
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Free IntranetLive.com Event To Tour Kellogg's Intranet
Building and managing a compelling intranet that meets the needs of your organization can be challenging, but a look at the best practices employed by other leading intranets is always good fodder for brainstorming and emulation.
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IBM's New OpusUna Web-Conferencing Platform
At IBM's Market Street offices in San Francisco this week, I saw a first-hand demo of OpusUna, a unique Web-conferencing platform that incorporates widgets, audio, and video cameras so that multiple users can collaborate and communicate from within the same browser.
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Top 10 Things IT Pros Should Be Afraid Of
Boo! These days, Halloween doesn't hold a candle to the frights technology professionals have to deal with in the so-called real world. To illustrate, bMighty has put together a unique Top 10 List of Horrors that may actually be threatening your company right now.
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Is $300 Too Much For The BlackBerry Bold?
In the day of the $200 iPhone, can the BlackBerry Bold, soon to be available from AT&T, compete with its $300 price point?
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Will Slow-But-Steady Stay In The Race?
Even though it's been pushed and cajoled for the last several years, the health care industry pretty much remains a turtle when it comes to adopting IT, right? Well, maybe not.
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Mr. Schmidt Goes To Florida With Obama
A few weeks ago, I was at a news event with Mike McCurry and I asked the former Clinton press secretary for some perspective on the technology lobby. I wondered whether he thought tech companies were any faster than others in terms of advocating for themselves in Washington.
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Google Tweaks GMail Contacts Function
One frustrating aspect of GMail is the contacts application. Once you e-mail someone five times or more, that e-mail address is automatically added to your contact list. The result? A contact list that is way larger than you probably want it to be. Google has ditched this function.
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Now How Much Would You Pay (For Linux)?
How much would it cost to create a Linux distribution from scratch -- assuming, that is, Linux didn't exist yet? The Linux Foundation crunched some numbers and came up with an answer: around $10.8 billion.
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Android Market Details Emerge
Maybe you've already picked up your G1 and are now tearing through the Android Market. Once you're done rocking to TuneWiki, and playing Pac-Man, you may wonder what's going to happen next.
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Who Has The Most Energy-Efficient Data Centers, Google Or Microsoft?
Both Google and Microsoft in the past month have disclosed details of their data center energy usage, confirming that the two software giants operate some of the most efficient facilities in the world.
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Clustered NAS In The Cloud
It seems that nowhere is the use of clustered NAS going to be more prevalent than in the cloud. They seem tailor made for each other because cloud-based services have the need for massive scaling and moderate performance while being very cost effective. Clustered NAS solutions seem to fill that bill.
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AT&T: BlackBerry Bold Goes On Sale November 4
It is finally official. AT&T just announced that the much-delayed and long-awaited BlackBerry Bold will be available starting on Tuesday, Nov. 4. (I think there's something else important going on that day, too.)
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Shell's Progress On UC
The big headline out of Johan Krebbers' keynote at VoiceCon Amsteradam was Krebbers' assertion that at Shell, voice is no more important than the other peer-to-peer real-time media. In his talk, Krebbers elaborated, saying that within Shell today, if you travel, you're encouraged to use a softphone to save on international dialing; the expectation is that you'll become comfortable enough with the softphone that you'll be willing to use it when you're in the office as well.
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Apple Sells 6.9M iPhones, Beating RIM In Sales
Apple announced its fiscal fourth quarter earnings yesterday. Perhaps the highlight of Apple's results are the iPhone sales figures. Apple moved 6.9 million of them in the fourth quarter alone, bringing the total number of iPhones sold to just under 13 million. Apple CEO Steve Jobs made sure to mention that the iPhone 3G outsold all RIM devices in the same quarter.
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MEF: The Standards Group To Watch
The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) really is a good model for standardization bodies. The MEF brings service providers and equipment makers together to create standards for all facets of Carrier Ethernet as well as providing conformance testing and certification. Kevin Vachon, COO of the MEF, provided some interesting insights into the direction of the MEF and, therefore, the direction of Carrier Ethernet.
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Consumer Electronics Green Report Offers Hope And Spin
The Consumer Electronics Association offers a mix of optimism and green spin in the release of what it calls the "first industry-wide consumer electronics environmental sustainability report."
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Ethernet Expo: Future Of Carrier Ethernet
Ethernet Expo is the place to be to get current on the technology and service offerings. While the main show is aimed more toward service providers, enterprise attendees to the show can gain some valuable insights on upcoming standards work, deployments, and last mile connectivity.
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Darn, I Missed Anti-Piracy Day!
Tuesday was Anti-Piracy Day, according to Microsoft. (Don't confuse this with Talk Like a Pirate Day, which was a month ago.) This day is intended to highlight awareness of pirated software, especially pirated Microsoft software.
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Protecting Your Identity: It’s About Much More Than Tech
When thinking about identity theft, we often get caught up in the big retail hacks, the lost and unencrypted backup tapes, and how we interact with Web sites. But that's often the wrong focus. Here's why.
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Android Arrives
In a phone interview, a sleep-deprived Dave Bort, the Google engineer spearheading the Android Open Source Project, said that Android would benefit industry players and phone users by providing an open smartphone standard and by relieving developers of having to reinvent the wheel.
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The BlackBerry Storm Has A Good Keyboard
As you may know, RIM's first touch-screen smartphone was introduced a few weeks ago, and I'm sure that every CrackBerry addict wanted to know if it can provide a messaging and keyboard experience that you expect from a BlackBerry. I was able to spend a good amount of time playing with it at the BlackBerry Developer Conference, and let's just say I wish I could use profanity on this Web site because the virtual keyboard is bleeping amazing.
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Join Us In San Diego Thursday For The Geek Bonfire
If you're in San Diego on Thursday, join us for soft drinks, snacks, and networking at the San Diego Geek Bonfire Meetup. It's open to IT managers, programmers, social networking addicts, Web entrepreneurs, science fiction fans, comic fans, gamers -- anybody who's into nerdy activities or who likes talking with people who enjoy those things.
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Site Search Provider Gets Patent And Enters U.S. Market
Adding a site search to your Web site or blog can increase traffic and readership by allowing readers access to stories around a topic or subject. Many companies provide site search functionality, including Google, Eurekster, and Lijit. Today another company has entered the U.S. market and it's bringing along a freshly issued patent.
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A Week Of Open Source Riches
Over the last couple of weeks, many of the open source projects that I use on a daily basis enjoyed new releases, including a Firefox competitor (sort of): Flock 2.0. Upgrade time!
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Motorola Proves It Still Has Design Chops
Motorola announced its best-looking handset in ages today, the Aura. With its stainless steel design and quartz face, this elegant, hand-crafted phone strives to be the Rolex of mobile phones. It comes complete with a Rolex-like $2,000 price tag.
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Google Keeps Its Word, Gives Android Away To Anyone For Free
Just one day ahead of the launch of the world's first Android phone, Google has opened up the mobile phone platform to anyone who wants it. You can now download the entire Android Open Source Project for free.
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Report: BlackBerry Pearl Flip Not Selling Well
RIM's foray into the consumer-friendly clamshell design with the Pearl Flip is off to a rocky start. According to reports, sales have been "tepid." That's not a word usually associated with BlackBerry phones.
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HP's Bright Spot Amid Green Storm Clouds
Hewlett-Packard yesterday provided a ray of sunshine amid some gloomy green-energy prognostications, announcing that it recently completed a 1.1-megawatt solar panel installation at its San Diego facility and that it would begin selling special-edition desktop PCs that consume 45% less power than its comparable PCs.
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Legal Hold Software Getting Smarter
Recommind and Guidance have launched products to help companies preserve electronically stored information for legal and audit investigations.
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Android Market Gouged Of Apps, But Mobile MySpace Gets Added
Something's afoot with the Android Market, the place where Android users can go to find and buy software for their Android devices. Earlier today, the Android Market went from 50+ apps down to 13. Um, what happened, Google? Thankfully, MySpace has picked up the slack with a mobile version of itself.
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iGoogle Uproar Shows Google Needs A Warmer Touch
Google's heavy reliance on automation may be a license to print money in the search advertising business, but as Google transforms itself from doorway to destination, it may have to develop a more personal touch.
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IDC Says IT Cloud Services To Reach $42 Billion By 2012
Based on a survey of IT executives, CIOs, and other business leaders, IDC said this week it expects spending on IT cloud services to grow almost threefold in the next five years, reaching $42 billion by 2012.
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RIM's Storm Blowing Into Stores November 16?
That Boy Genius is at it again, as he has dug up some documentation that says RIM's first touch-screen BlackBerry will hit Best Buys on Nov. 16. Hopefully, the BlackBerry Storm won't pull a Bold on us and face constant delays.
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Disasters Strike Sports Broadcasts - Fans Frantic
In a coincidence so large I'm sure Richard Belzer is starting a conspiracy theory about it, both the San Diego Chargers at Buffalo Bills game this Sunday and game 6 of the American League Championship Series on Saturday were knocked out by technology failures. What is the world coming to? If the proletariat isn't feed a constant stream of sports entertainment to take their minds off the events of the day, the workers will rise up to seize the means of production, or vote. That, and PR folks have experts to tell me how they would have prevented these events.
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SensorNets To Help Curb Retail Theft
One of the biggest wastes retailers must endure is inventory items that mysteriously disappear. Goods all too commonly vanish from the warehouses where they're stored, during their shipment, and from within the store itself. The German Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS has some ideas on how tech can be used to slow the shrinkage.
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New SharePoint Sheriff In Town
Autonomy ControlPoint aims to bring governance to the wild west of SharePoint content. But does SharePoint need it?
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Clustered NAS, Part One
It seems as though every manufacturer is now offering clustered NAS. There are so many variants that I can't cover everything about them in one entry, but basically each solution tends to focus on a particular capability; some are built for scale, others are built for performance, and, of course, there are solutions that try to deliver a happy medium. Over the next several entries we will do some exploration of these systems and where they might make sense for you.
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Ballmer: Microsoft Unlikely To Top Vista's 'Success'
Apple taunts it, businesses won't touch it, and even Microsoft no longer mentions it by name in ads. Yet Windows Vista, according to Steve Ballmer, has been such a smashing success that Microsoft is unlikely to match it anytime soon.
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Competing With 'Free' - Or, Rather, 'Agile'
Over at the Monday Note blog, former Apple/Be maven Jean-Louis Gassée poses a rhetorical question to Microsoft: How do you compete with free? But it's not just "free" that Microsoft's competing with here, and it's not "open," either. It's "agile."
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YouTube: Need Help? Don't Bother Us
For most users, Google doesn't provide much opportunity to interact with them directly when you're having problems with their services. Sure, paying Apps customers can get help when they need it, but Google apparently doesn't want to be bothered by the teeming masses of YouTube users who can't figure out how to work the YouTube site.
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Motorola: Our Android Phone Will Be Cheaper, Better, Funnerer
More specs of the Android-based phone from Motorola have hit the Webosphere and the news is looking good. The phone will have a large touch screen, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and will undercut the HTC G1 by $30.
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Green Power Bargains: Buying In Bulk
Need another reason to go green? How about stable, predictable energy costs?
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Windows Update Isn't Listening
I was out of the office most of last week, traveling on business. My system has quite a few automated tasks that run, so I tend to leave it running even when I'm away. I returned to the office to find the system had rebooted, with a message that Windows Update had applied patches. There's just one problem: I don't use that option.
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Web TV: Smelling Like A Rose
Don't be alarmed if you can't decide whether midroll is better than preroll (the former happens after you turn 30), or if lower-third overlays are a good thing (better than a layover in Dallas, I'm sure), because -- and I don't want to name names here, but what choice do I have -- nobody's figured out the right way to make money on Web TV.
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Video: iRise Rising With 'Look Before You Code' Visualization Tool
Does writing software have to be an uncomfortable duel between the people driving the spec, who never seem to get what they want when the code comes back, and developers who lament the ambiguous instructions they've been given? Not if you can see what your app is going to look like first. That’s the idea behind iRise and its business visualization software. Check out my video chat with Emmet Keeffe, CEO of iRise, who explains it all.
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Baby On The Way? These Five Web Services Can Help
As more people share their lives online, a natural extension is to share information with friends and family about a baby, both pre- and post-birth. We've seen many Twitter births over the past year. But what happens when you want to share more information and media? A handful of new companies aim to create the ultimate baby website.
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New Calif. State Legislation Threatens Stiff Medical Privacy Penalties
Two new state medical privacy laws, AB211 and SB541, make it possible for institutions and individuals to be fined up to $250,000 for being lax when it comes to the medical privacy of California residents. It's about time.
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VC Funding Begins To Dry Up
Venture capital investment declined in the third quarter to the lowest level in almost two years, and funding to Internet companies plunged 36% in just one quarter. The much-anticipated slowdown in VC investment has begun.
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Step Two Designs Introduce A Free Resource For Intranets
There are dozens (or hundreds or thousands) of resources for intranet advice on the Web, and while some of them do deliver helpful advice and articles on the life cycle of planning, building, deploying, and maintaining an intranet, many lack depth and hands-on experience.
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Mobile News Roundup
It's been an interesting week in the mobile space, with a new touch-screen phone from Motorola, earning reports from Nokia and Sony Ericsson, as well as developments from the FCC. But there was some more news that you may not have caught.
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Fear Fridays
It may be time to store "Thank God It's Friday," or "TGIF," for the winter. With the economy on life support, Friday could become the preferred day for layoffs.
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Welcome To The Cloud. Please Place Your AMI (Whatzat?) Here
Does cloud computing sound like fun, something your department or business unit could do while waiting for IT to come up with that new system you requested two years ago? Why not make use of somebody else's computing infrastructure, especially if they're smart enough to figure out how to give you access to it?
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Yahoo, YouTube, And The New XYZ's
More startups are coming out with names that are a jumble of vowels and consonants: Ooyala, Vysr, Zoosa, Zuora. If there's an art to naming a new company, we've entered the dissonance period.
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CEP Moves From Wall Street To Main Street
Amid the economic turmoil that's gripped Wall Street the past few months, Adam Honoré, a senior analyst at Aite Group who specializes in brokerage and financial services technology, declares that "human factors such as poor risk management, not computerized trading," are primarily responsible for the market's current volatility.
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Internet2’s High-Def LHC Teleconference
My first impression is that it's an odd place to try to unlock the mystery of the Big Bang theory: 300 feet below a bucolic French village in an unpresupposing conference room, next to a 10-foot-high tunnel stuffed with catwalks, cables, and a thousand cylindrical, supercooled magnets, linked like sausages in an underground ring 17 miles in circumference.
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Saving Energy By Raising Your Data Center Thermostat
Google is the latest company in the data center industry experimenting with raising the thermostats in its data centers as a way of saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in energy costs, according to a report this week by Data Center Knowledge.
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Tackling The SaaS Integration Challenge
I've talked to many business technology managers who are intrigued by the idea of software as a service. But their top question is almost always the same: What's the best way to integrate SaaS with your other business applications? We tackle this issue in an in-depth story published this week, "SaaS Integration: Real-World Problems, And How CIOs Are Solving Them."
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Open Source Installs, Courtesy Of ... Microsoft?
Earlier this week Microsoft took another step toward making open source part of its balanced breakfast: it introduced the Web Platform Installer. It not only installs Microsoft's own Web stack, but a slew of common open-source Web apps. Prepare to see more flying pigs, I say.
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RIM Prepping A Touch-Screen Bold?
I know many of you are (still) waiting for the BlackBerry Bold, and others anxiously waiting for the drop date of the touch-screen BlackBerry Storm. Well, if the Boy Genius Report is correct, you may want to wait for next year when Research In Motion will bring out a BlackBerry with a full QWERTY keyboard and a touch screen.
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Verizon Wireless Contests McCain Cell Tower Story
This week there's been a bit of a brouhaha over whether or not Verizon Wireless gave Arizona senator and presidential candidate John McCain special treatment by building a cell tower near his Arizona home. The Washington Post says it did, Verizon Wireless says it didn't.
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NASing Around
Primary storage needs a break from the capacity optimization drumbeat ... at least mine. Let's focus on one of the other top subjects at SNW: network-attached storage (NAS). It's certainly not a new technology, but NAS has remained near the top of everyone's mind and now with the growing interest in NFS and VMware, there's additional wind in the sails of NAS adoption.
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Great Depression 2.0
If we're heading for another depression, it will look a lot different this time around thanks to Apple, Google, and the Internet. Here's a few predictions of what we'll see.
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Enterprise Day At Ethernet Expo
LightReading and InformationWeek are putting on Enterprise Day at the end of Ethernet Expo on Oct. 22 at the Hilton in New York. Registration for the event is open. Spending the day will get you up to speed on the happenings in Carrier Ethernet from both a standards and business perspective.
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Zen And The Art Of Data Center Maintenance
The U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency yesterday outlined the steps they are taking to not only measure power use in data centers but to give meaning to those numbers, as well. The Zenic goal is to create a standard for measuring efficiency.
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Gmail Outage Shakes The Google Faithful
An unknown number of Gmail and Google Apps users were unable to access their accounts for more than 24 hours earlier this week. According to some, the outage was negatively impacting their business.
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Green Car Maker Tesla's Troubles Signal Wider Clean Tech Woes
When New Yorkers start cutting back on Botox and rhinoplasties1, you know the financiapocalypse2 is upon us. The only thing to do is hold on tight and hope the next bubble comes quick.
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Nokia's Touch Phone Makes Appearance In Britney Spears Video
Nokia recently announced its first touch-screen mobile phone, the 5800 XpressMusic. Nokia convinced Britney Spears to include the phone in her most recent music video, placing the 5800 squarely in front of the eyes of its target market (a.k.a., young'uns).
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InformationWeek Launches PlugIntoTheCloud.com
Is cloud computing the next major IT model? Or a rat's nest of security vulnerabilities, service outages, policy complexity, and vendor lock-in? The computer industry is split on The Cloud, with believers and skeptics arguing both sides. Now InformationWeek is diving -- skydiving -- into the fray.
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Crosby: Walk The Walk, Yes, But Not Down The OVF Path
In the wee hours of the morning recently, I posted a blog addressed to the virtualization vendors: "It's Time To Walk The Walk, Not Just Talk," advocating greater use of the recently emerged OVF standard. Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix Systems' XenSource unit, was four time zones away in Cambridge, England, but it only took him about four hours to track me down.
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Get The Latest InformationWeek Analytics Audio: Managing Virtual Servers
Find out how you can rein in the sprawl of proliferating virtual machines in the latest InformationWeek Analytics Audio: Managing Virtual Servers.
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Adobe (Somewhat) Fixes ClickJacking Vulnerability
With the release of Flash Player 10, Adobe fixes a critical security vulnerability known as "clickjacking." But for those users who can't or don't want to update to the latest version -- well, they're out of luck for a while.
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HTC Touch Pro Delayed
I have some bad news if you were anxiously awaiting the HTC HTC Touch Pro. It looks like the touch-screen smartphone with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard has been delayed.
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IT Gets Mention In Presidential Debate
Considering technology's colossal impact on our world in recent years, you'd think presidential candidates might talk a bit more about it. Lo and behold, information technology did get a mention in last night's presidential debate.
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iPhone Ranks Behind Motorola Razr (Again), This Time In Mobile Web Use
This statistic is pretty interesting: Not only does the Motorola Razr continue to outsell the Apple iPhone, more people are using it to access to the mobile Web. So says AdMob, anyway, in a report of the ad impressions it gets from each handset across the 5,000-plus sites it serves.
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Early G1 Reviews Leak Out
With the G1 set to be released next week, a flood of early reviews have come out. What's the overall verdict? It appears that the handset is not quite ready for prime time, but the Android software shows a ton of promise.
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Google Makes Updates To iGoogle
Today, Google rolled out an updated design for iGoogle to all U.S. users, which includes full canvas views for gadgets and support for full feed reading. These changes make iGoogle a more useful homepage.
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Linux, The Standard Version
The first public beta of version 4.0 of the Linux Standard Base is upon us, and with it comes some thoughts: How exactly do you standardize something as protean as Linux? Answer: Create a standard that goes with the flow.
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Primary Storage Under Siege
It seemed like Storage Networking World was all set to make solid-state disks the big theme at this year's event, and then the economy went in the tank. Primary storage suddenly became an evil, expensive power-hungry monster that needed to be eradicated. To the rescue came solutions that would compress, dedupe, thin, and migrate this villain down to size.
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High Praise For Schieffer Aside, Groups Still Calling For Open Debates
While Bob Schieffer receives widespread praise for moderating the last presidential debate Wednesday night, supporters of both candidates have called for change. Republicans and Democrats have joined forces to demand tougher follow-up questions and more openness.
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Breakdown: The Bold Costs RIM $170 To Make
iSuppli is at it again. This time, it got its mitts on a BlackBerry Bold smartphone, dismantled it, and came up with the cost of materials. The sum of parts, labor and testing is about $170. Reports suggest the phone will sell for $300 when it arrives in the U.S. That's some healthy margins for RIM.
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Help Me Decide: WiMax Or Comcast?
When I signed up for Sprint's new Xohm WiMax service two weeks ago, I thought it might just end up being a short-term test. Now, however, I'm debating dropping Comcast as my ISP, and I want your help.
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Shrinking Footprints Of Green Giants
In less than two weeks, as part of the National Renewable Energy Marketing Conference in Denver, the U.S. EPA, U.S. DOE, and the Center for Resource Solutions (CRS) will host the annual Green Power Leadership Awards to recognize those who advance the market for renewable electricity sources. Can't wait for those envelopes to be opened? Take a look at three other environmental winners from the computer industry.
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Google Loaded Android With A Remote Kill Switch
This isn't going to make people happy. Remember the furor when people discovered that Apple could remotely kill applications running on iPhones? Well, Google has decided to implement the same type of action. It can remove programs it deems "bad" from your HTC G1.
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Blast From The Past: A 1995 Guide To Doing Business On The Internet
I stumbled over a copy of the book Doing (More) Business On The Internet, which I picked up 13 years ago when first getting a handle on this strange, new form of electronic business. Leafing through it is like looking at your high school yearbook, without the bad haircuts. The cover alone is like a trip in the Back to the Future car.
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Wix.com Makes Flash Site Development Seem Easy
Wix, a company whose tools allow its users to create impressive Flash-based sites without programming or Flash skills, announced this week that it's adding a number of premium options to its services.
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Cell Phone New Cybercrime Frontline
Whether it's your iPhone, Windows Mobile device, Android, or BlackBerry -- you're probably using your smartphone more like a computer more and more. That's great, but the more your phone acts like a PC -- the more likely all of the problems associated with PCs will follow, researchers said today. Should you care?
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The HTC G1 Android Phone Starts Shipping Ahead Of Schedule
Those who preordered the HTC G1 Android phone may be seeing a special package arrive in the mail as early as this Friday. The G1 has started shipping.
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451 Group: 'Open Source Not A Business Model'
It sounds like the title for an inflammatory puff piece, but it really isn't. It's the title of a new report issued by the 451 Group's Commercial Adoption of Open Source subdivision. And in it, the research firm makes a good case for its premise. Open source is a development model, but there's a whole slew of business models that fit on top of it.
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Startup Launches Virtual Firewall
Deployed as a virtual appliance, the firewall enforces individual security policies for VMs and controls inter-VM communication.
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Why eBay Won't Win Its War Against Amazon
What happens when an online auction site tries to get all store-like, and a non-bricks-and-mortar buying destination starts buying into bidding? Apparently, you get Amazon pumped up into a one-stop shop for everything you need, while eBay ends up tilting toward irrelevance. Let me explain.
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Report: Cell Phones Next Target For Hackers
The first Trojans and viruses for mobile phones appeared several years ago. They were aimed at smartphones, which, at the time, meant Palm OS and Symbian OS. Now that smartphones are more prevalent -- and are capable of doing more damage -- they are juicier targets for ne'er-do-wells.
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Citrix Tries BYOC
Last month I suggested future computing models would let employees pick their own machine with company funds, fetching a corporate desktop via some mix of VM tech. At Citrix, the future is now.
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We Don't Need No Stinking DNS Root Zone Signing
John Timmons at Ars Techinca wrote about the interorganizational wrangling beginning as .gov studies DNS fix. At issue: Who should implement and manage the root signing process rasises the question about who should hold the root keys to such a critical service. But my question is, why does the root zone need to be signed at all?
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Red, Blue, And Green States
Do you live in a red state or blue state? In less than three weeks, Californians and Missourians will vote on how to make their states greener.
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Demise Of Storm Botnet Clears Way For More Nimble Botnets
A number of security researchers now say the infamous Storm botnet, which has been quiet for about a month, could very well be dead. Some are saying the era of big botnets may be over.
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Thoughts On The HTC Touch Diamond
The HTC Touch Diamond has been out for about a month on Sprint, and I recently got to spend some quality time with the touch-screen smartphone. The smartphone is a very slick and attractive Windows Mobile touch-screen smartphone, but is it all style and no substance?
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My (Tentative) Wish List For A Better Secure Browser
Web browsers are where the client machine rubber meets the Web server road. So it stands to reason that strong Web browser security is paramount -- far more effective than relying on thousands of Web application/plug-in developers to write more secure code. There are definitely some browser developers that are making strides in the right directions, but none of them are quite there yet. I'm still thinking through this, but if I were writing my wish list for a more secure Web browser today (and, well... I am) then here's what it would be:
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DriveAssist Stops Incoming Calls While Driving, Aims To Save Lives
New software from Aegis Mobility will block inbound calls and text messages when it determines that a cell phone is in a moving vehicle. It can be used to mitigate distractions for teens, as well as your employees who need to drive while on the job.
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HP Software Veep: Cloud Is A Channel, Not A Panacea
Here at Cloud Summit Executive at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, HP senior VP of software Tom Hogan took the stage to share some of what HP has learned about the attitudes of senior IT personnel and CIOs when it comes to cloud computing (as well as HP's response in terms of its go-to-cloud-market strategy). One of Hogan's key messages was that cloud computing is less of a model or the computing panacea it's often described as and should be looked upon as a very efficient channel.
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Fuel Cells On The Road, Again
Toshiba said last week at Japan's CEATEC show that it would begin incorporating fuel cells into some mobile products, including cell phones and laptops. Maxell also demonstrated a prototype at the trade show.
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Is Motorola Working On An Android-Powered Social Networking Phone?
A few weeks ago we found out that Motorola was looking to boost the number of people working on an Android phone. According to a new Motorola job posting, it is working on a "new Android Social Networking SmartPhone." Cue dramatic music.
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Cloud Computing: Like The iPod For Infrastructure
It's perhaps a foregone conclusion that the speakers at the Cloud Summit Executive conference, being held Tuesday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., would insist that cloud computing isn't just marketing hype.
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What Technology Can Teach Schools About Kids
Is your kid's school using technology in innovative, exceptional, or surprising ways? I'm not talking only about in-the-classroom use of computers; I'm also referring to technology that's being deployed behind the scenes.
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Getting The Word Out About OpenOffice.org 3
OpenOffice.org 3 is here at last. It's an evolutionary change from 2, not a revolutionary one, and if deployed right it could be yet another nibble out of Microsoft's big Office cookie. The trick is how to get the word out.
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Blog Comment Replacement Service Gets Boost
Blog comment replacement services have been very popular over the past year, with more companies sprouting up offering to make commenting and comment management easier. One of these companies is JS-Kit, which has announced today that it has raised $3.6 million in a new Series B round of funding.
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Motorola Rolls Out The Krave, A Touch-Based Phone
Motorola and Verizon Wireless have teamed up to offer the Krave, a mass-market minded handset that uses touch technology. At first blush, there's a lot to like about the Krave. Is Motorola's attempt at a touch phone a worthy competitor to the myriad of touch devices already in the market?
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Virtualization Vendors: Time To Walk The Walk, Not Just Talk
Virtualization offers many potential savings through server consolidation and reduced server administration labor. But it also poses the age-old hazard of vendor lock-in. The field is young enough that the market leader, VMware, and the bigger companies that are following in its footsteps have not yet been called to account for their proprietary moves. But that's increasingly hard to bear when there's a solution so close at hand.
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Cloud Computing Providers Gather In Silicon Valley For One-Day Mind Meld
I'm in Silicon Valley today, attending, panel moderating, twittering, and blogging from the one-day Cloud Summit Executive (produced by InformationWeek's parent TechWeb) and the event was kicked off with a brief introduction by Sand Hill Group co-founder MR Rangaswami.
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Zimplit Aims To Simplify Content Management
At a time when other content management systems are locked in what seems like an arms race to add new features, a return to simplicity can be kind of refreshing. Introduced just a few months ago, Zimplit claims to be the easiest content management system ever made, and while I'd argue that on a number of levels, it is pretty darn easy to set up and use.
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The Next Windows Has An Official Name
For several months, Microsoft has referred to its Vista successor as "Windows 7." Most of us naturally thought that name was a placeholder for a moniker that would be crafted through deep thought in the marketing department and several months of focus groups. Well, throw all that away. The next version of Windows will be called Windows 7.
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V to V’ing With Parallels
One side of my production shop is all-Mac. Or soon to be all-Mac hardware. Say what you will, we have our reasons. I’ve tooled around with Parallels server in the Virt Test Lab for IW; now I’m trying it with real end users in the mix.
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Google Competitor Uses Google Tech To Take E-Mail Offline
Cloud service provider Zoho announced that its e-mail service is exiting private beta today and is now publicly available. Interestingly, Zoho uses Google's own Gears technology to take Zoho Mail offline.
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Nevada Law Requires Encryption - Vendor Press Release Exaggerates When
A new Nevada law (NRS 597.970) effective Oct. 1 requires that businesses in Nevada encrypt personal information whenever it is electronically transmitted outside the business by any means other than fax. Predictably, I got a press release from an encryption software vendor that said "Even if a business never sends customer information via e-mail, the business will be at risk if a server, desktop, laptop, or electronic storage device is lost, stolen, or compromised." The real problem is the law is incredibly vague.
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Mobile Firefox One Step Closer to Release
Start getting used to the word "Fennec." It's the code name for the alpha release of Mozilla's mobile Firefox browser. According to reports, it will be surfacing next week.
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Don't Buy The G1 Sales Figures
If you've been on any tech site today or this weekend, you've undoubtedly seen multiple reports that the first Android-powered phone from T-Mobile has sold 1.5 million preorder units. This sounds like an amazing feat and quite frankly, I'm not buying it.
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Video: Rob Enderle, Aviva CIO Toby Redshaw Debate Tech Future
Got half an hour to slog through an interesting video? Then the online version of my 2008 InformationWeek 500 panel, entitled "Get to the Point," is for you! Aviva CIO Toby Redshaw and noted analyst Rob Enderle debate a bunch of hot tech topics and -- get this -- they don't always agree.
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Microsoft Readies For Likelihood Of Attacks
We provided you the heads up about the Microsoft "Exploitability Index" a couple of months ago when the software company announced the new index, designed to predict the likelihood its security vulnerabilities would be attacked. It's an interesting idea, but will it have much value for practitioners?
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To Linux, On Your 17th Birthday
Happy birthday, Big L. Now that you're old enough to get into an R-rated movie without an adult guardian, here's a little heart-to-heart from someone who's been watching you grow up.
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Saving Storage Dollars -- Manual Moves
With the current financial news, IT professionals are looking for ways to keep budgets flat. There is a common misconception in storage that there is only so much you can do. Over the next several entries, we'll explore a host of options that you can implement to curb storage costs. Today, it's manual moves.
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T-Mobile Pre-Sells 1.5 Million HTC G1 Android Phones
Wow. T-Mobile said that it had tripled its initial supply of Android phones, but it hadn't provided an actual number. Now we know: 1.5 million people have pre-ordered the G1, set to go on sale Oct. 22.
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Plasmon Falls Into Administration – Is Enterprise Optical Storage Dead?
Not so many years ago, optical storage looked like the future. While hard drives held 200MB, magneto-optical disks stored 650 MB and that could be WORM (Write Once Read Many), making optical jukeboxes the only storage medium that could meet the not deletable, not modifiable requirements of the regulations Wall Street broker dealers and other assorted deep-pocket customers had to comply with. Now it looks like optical disks may join head-per-track disks on the scrapheap of storage.
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World Bank (Allegedly) Hacked
It seems, based on a FoxNews.com report that broke Friday that the World Bank Group suffered a series of cyberattacks during the past few months. The claims of the level of access gained by the attackers are troubling -- but the real extent of the breach remains in dispute, and unknown.
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New Back Door Targeting Windows Users Surfaces
Security firm Barracuda Networks says it spotted a new virus that attempts to install a back door on the systems of its victims. It's spread via an e-mail purporting to be a Microsoft security update.
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Red Hat In Desktop Virtualization--Who's Buying That?
It's hard to know whether there's more than meets the eye with Red Hat's acquisition of Qumranet. Yes, it gets expertise in the open source KVM hypervisor, and KVM is the alternative preferred by open source developers. But what can Red Hat actually do with a desktop virtualization product? How's it going to make headway against Citrix XenServer and VMware's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure? There's potential in KVM, but is there traction in desktop virtualization for Red Hat?
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BlackBerry Flip Reviewed
With the touch-screen BlackBerry Storm and the Bold grabbing headlines now, Research In Motion's first clamshell smartphone may get overlooked. The BlackBerry Flip should be coming to T-Mobile real soon, and our friends over at BerryReporter have just published a hands-on review.
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Spin Control: Verizon Wireless Backpeddles On SMS Rate Brouhaha
Yesterday, a report said that Verizon Wireless was set to begin charging companies 3 cents to send text messages through its network to end users. The news has brought about a furor, and today Verizon issued a statement hoping to set the record straight.
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Smartphones As Laptop Killers: GM CIO Ralph Szygenda Opines
Want to hear some good news about General Motors in these troubled economic times? For one thing, it's a thought leader in enterprise mobility. GM CIO Ralph Szygenda talked to me for the InformationWeek cover story, "Is The Smartphone Your Next Computer?" "Our senior executives are demanding more capabilities on their smartphones," he says in the piece. Here's an expanded dive into his thoughts.
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Green Jobs And Fuzzy Math
How many jobs can be created through a clean-energy economy?
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Lawsuit Tsunami: Good For E-Discovery Vendors?
Lawsuits driven by the financial crisis may be good news for companies that sell electronic discovery software and services.
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Google Adds Better Video Support To Picasa Web Albums
I don't know about you, but I use my point-and-shoot camera to record video more often than hauling out my actual video camera. The result? Tons of 30-second snippets that I'd love to be able to share without posting them to YouTube. Google just made it a heck of a lot easier by adding video support to its Picasa Web albums.
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EMC's Mozy Raises Interesting Questions About OSes And Backing Them Up
Earlier this week, InformationWeek's Antone Gonsalves reported on EMC's launch of MozyPro, an online backup service for business desktop, notebook, and servers running Apple's Mac OS X. There's a consumer version, too. As business user of a MacBook Pro, I'm candidate for this service. I use VMware's Fusion (also owned by EMC), so my Mac can host an x86 virtual machine (VM) that runs Windows Vista when I need it to. I'll give Mozy a looksie. But, moving forward, desktop VM technologies like Fusion and VMware Workstation raise interesting questions about the traditional approach to "backing up."
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Hard Times: Open Source's New Big Test
Grim financial times are not "ahead"; they're here, now. Belt-tightening and budget-butchering across the board are the order of the day. Now's the time for commercial vendors of open source to show what they're made of: if they can weather this, they can weather anything.
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What Would Microsoft Gain By Buying RIM?
A Reuters report suggests that Microsoft would benefit from buying Research In Motion, especially now that the BlackBerry maker's share price has dropped to about $60. Would bringing RIM into the Redmond fold really benefit either company?
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BlackBerry Bold Yanked From Store Shelves
At this point, things can't look much worse for the much-delayed BlackBerry Bold. Network operator Orange in the U.K. has instructed employees to stop selling the device because of software issues.
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Symantec Buys MessageLabs: SaaS Security Ready To Rock
Symantec snaps up e-mail security services, IM, and Web-filtering company MessageLabs for $695 million. It's a great fit and shows Symantec is (finally) serious about how security software will be delivered in the years to come.
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Dell Enters Backup Appliance Market
Dell's new DL2000 backup appliances represent the company's first backup appliances aimed at the midmarket, providing those SMBs that view Dell as their primary technology vendor with a turnkey backup-to-disk solution. Dell is bundling a 2U server (that looks a lot like a PowerEdge 2900 to me) with its MD1000 SAS attached SAS/SATA JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) external cabinets and enhanced versions of either Symantec's Backup Exec or CommVault's Simpana backup.
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Ektron CMS400.NET v7.6 Improves SEO And Multisite Support
Ektron CMS400.NET v7.6 was released late last month, focusing mainly on a number of improvements intended to help sites built with the content management system improve their placement in search engines. In addition, other enhancements include centralized multisite support and optional e-commerce functionality for its enterprise offering.
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Entellium Slashes Staff, Top Execs Arrested
You know things have got to be bad when your CEO and CFO/COO suddenly quit, two-thirds of your employees are laid off, and then those same execs are arrested. That's exactly what happened at CRM company Entellium over the last few weeks.
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T-Mobile Nabs A 5-Megapixel Shooter
Looks like T-Mobile will be getting a sweet touch-screen phone with a 5-megapixel camera. The folks at TmoNews have gotten their hands on some spy shots of the Samsung T919.
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First User Review Of The HTC G1 Surfaces
Someone in the world has received the HTC G1 Android phone and has seen fit to publish a review of the device. He lists a lot of pros and cons that match with observations made at the device's launch in NYC a few weeks ago.
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Toshiba Satellite E105's Dull 'Silver' Finish
Toshiba's new 14.1-inch laptop, the Satellite E105, has earned the company more green laurels and a Silver classification from the Green Electronics Council's EPEAT program. That sounds great, but when you look closely, Silver has a dull finish.
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Report: Android Seen As Smartphone Catalyst
A new report out by ABI Research pegs Google's Android platform as the tipping point that will cause smartphones to become mainstream devices and not just gadgets for geeks and business users.
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The End Of The World -- LinuxWorld, That Is
I didn't go to LinuxWorld this year. People who did go told me I didn't miss anything. Now LinuxWorld itself is being rebranded as the OpenSource World Conference & Expo -- a sign for me that a) Linux is that much more mainstream and b) it's getting subsumed that much more into open source as a whole.
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Motorola's Razr Beats The iPhone. Again
Despite the success of the Apple iPhone, Motorola can still claim to have the best-selling mobile phone in the United States. How long can the Razr hold onto the top spot? Can it fend off the competition forever? What is this simple phone's appeal?
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OpenLogic On Enterprise Open Source: A View From Inside
Curious about patterns in corporate use of open source, I chatted up VP of Marketing Kim Weins for OpenLogic, creators of the OSS Discovery tool and a leading maker of open source enterprise integration and support tools. My rationale: they've seen how it works from the inside, so they ought to know.
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Windows Strata: Rolling Thunder, Or Another Hailstorm?
It appears that a slip of the agenda may have revealed the name of Microsoft's new "cloud OS," which seems to be named Windows Strata. Or perhaps that's just a code name. Steve Ballmer has said we'd find out more at the Professional Developer's Conference later this month; we just found out a bit early. I wonder more about the substance of Windows Strata.
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What's Next For WordPress?
WordPress is a popular blogging platform that's available in a variety of versions, including: self-hosted (WordPress.org), hosted (WordPress.com), and WordPress MU for multiple blogs on a single installation. The current version of the blogging software is 2.6.2 and the hot talk around the blogosphere is what's coming next for WordPress?
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Mashup Camp Returns To Silicon Valley On November 17
Are you one of the more than 120 people on the who's coming list of people attending this Fall's Mashup Camp? If not, then why not? The mashup approach to software development -- the one whereby applications are built in hours instead of weeks, months or years by melding together functionality and data that's scattered across the Web, a network or both -- will likely make mashups the most important of all software ecosystems for everything from launching new Web-based startups to the development of custom enterprise applications.
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Zuora Taps PayPal For Cloud Payments
After getting its start as a billing platform for software as a service, Zuora is coming full circle with a service for collecting on the tab. The startup's new Z-Payments service ties into PayPal's e-payments system.
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Need To Save Your E-Mails? Google Will Do It For A Fee
If your industry requires that communications such as e-mail be archived, Google is offering a hosted e-mail security and archiving product called Google Message Discovery. The cost: $45 per user per year.
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Symantec Buys Into Online E-Mail Archiving
Acquisition of MessageLabs fills a major gap in Symantec's software as a service portfolio, but the software giant also may be aiding a smaller competitor
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Green TCO Includes Everything From Cradle To Grave
What's the total cost of ownership of IT? It depends on who's footing the bill. When it comes to the environment, of course, we all do. And that's why it's important to consider IT sustainability in its entirety, from cradle to grave.
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Five Reasons Why The BlackBerry Storm Rocks
Now that the news is finally out, we can sit back and take a longer look at what makes the Storm a compelling handset. Here are five reasons why it should be a success.
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IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce Crowd The Cloud
The scramble is on among major IT vendors to establish their place -- and their brands -- in the cloud. IBM on Oct. 6 announced a handful of Web services as part of its push into cloud computing. Microsoft will reveal new details about its cloud strategy later this month. And Salesforce.com is about to redouble its push into platforms as a service.
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Shell Stays Aggressive On UC Plans
Early on in the VoIP migration, you heard, "Voice is just another application on the network." Then you heard it wasn't; it was tougher to do and more mission critical. At VoiceCon Amsterdam next week, an executive from Royal Dutch Shell will say, in essence, that voice actually is just another application.
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Targeting Primary Storage
Primary storage is the next target of optimization. As mentioned in my last entry, the growth rate of active data on this storage is small, what is growing is the older data set which, for now, still remains on primary storage. Optimizing primary storage is the most significant step you can make in reducing not only your storage budget but also your storage's use of power and cooling.
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Tomorrow's Content Ecosystem
The refrain I heard over and over again at Conteninople's Contentonmics conference this week in Los Angeles was that the online ad market hadn't matured enough to support Internet content distribution, at least in the form envisioned by large media companies.
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BlackBerry Storm, Slayer Of iPhones, Blows Into Town With Gusto
Verizon Wireless and Research In Motion today announced the hotly anticipated Storm, the first touch-based device from the maker of BlackBerry smartphones. A quick glance at the spec sheet shows an impressive array of features, many of which are not included with the iPhone or the G1. How does RIM's iPhone killer stack up against the competition?
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About That Verizon Breach Report
I've just interviewed Dr. Peter Tippett from Verizon Business. If you're in the security business, you're probably already aware of the 2008 Data Breach Investigations Report issued in June of this year. The same team has just issued a followup supplement to that report -- Dr. Tippett is one of the contributors to that report.
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The DITA Standard Puts Its Money Where Its Mouth Is
You may have heard of Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) standards for content creation, and it's just as likely that your eyes glazed over as the DITA faithful sing its praises. It's easy to get down into the weeds quickly in a discussion of DITA, but at its core, it's an XML-based method for authoring content in reusable modules, organized by topic.
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HTC Touch HD Not Coming To U.S.
In the middle of September, HTC unveiled the gorgeous Touch HD. With a 3.8-inch screen and 480-by-800 resolution, this looked like an incredible multimedia phone. Sadly, it will not be coming to the United States.
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EU To Lock Horns With Apple Over iPhone Battery
The European Union is considering new legislation that would make it mandatory for electronic devices to have removable batteries. Apple already has taken flack -- and even suffered a lawsuit -- over the non-user-replaceable battery in the iPhone. As Michael Buffer would say, "Let's get ready to rumble!"
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Getting Green Takes Green
It takes green to go green. That's readily evident based on data released yesterday by Enterprise Management Associates that shows that the larger the enterprise, the more likely the business will sink money into greening its IT.
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The Red Flags On IT Spending
In our current article on IT strategies in this weakening economy, CIOs made it clear they aren't hitting the panic button. But two recent data points -- SAP's revenue warning, and a dip in U.S. IT employment -- suggest more IT leaders are punching the "pause" button at the least.
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Mobile Firefox Almost Ready For Alpha Testing
Speaking in a recent interview, Mozilla CEO John Lilly said that the company's long-awaited entry into the mobile browser space is nearly ready for prime time. Mozilla will have Firefox Mobile out to alpha testers in 'weeks.'
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A Storm Coming Tomorrow?
By now, we've seen a lot about Research In Motion's first touch-screen BlackBerry. We've seen the Vodafone teaser videos, read about the specs, and heard differing accounts on how good the virtual keyboard is. Well, word on the street is that the official announcement is coming tomorrow.
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Biggest Enemy Of Linux Netbooks Isn't Windows - It's Expectations
Linux netbooks face an uphill road, according to makers of one such machine, MSI. Their director of U.S. Sales, Andy Tung, noted that returns of Linux netbooks in general have been "higher than regular notebooks...the main cause of that is Linux." Wired carried the story, along with DesktopLinux and a number of other outlets. Still, I wouldn't throw in the (penguin-monogrammed) towel just yet.
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Google's 'Mail Goggles' Set To Be Your E-Mail Wingman
Every so often Google adds something new to Google Labs, where it tests nonfinal versions of software that may or may not become a standard feature. The latest is called Mail Goggles -- a play on "beer goggles" -- that just might save your tail when it comes to e-mail.
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Greg Kinnear In 'Flash Of Genius,' Or How Inventors Always Get Screwed
No, it's not a movie about nothing -- it's the story of the intermittent windshield wiper! Who knew that Hollywood would bite on the very American theme of the lone inventor screwed by the big, bad corporation. In this flick, Greg Kinnear plays Robert Kearns, who invented the drizzle-defying wiper, but had to fight Ford and Chrysler for decades for credit and payment for his invention.
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Taking Smartphones To The Next Level
In this economy, it can be hard to think long term. So in our article exploring the smartphones' future as a business computing platform, we don't go the "In five years, we think companies will ... " route. We ask: How ready is the smartphone today to replace a laptop?
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T-Mobile Sets Up Android Emulator To Appease The Hordes
Taking a clue from the unprecedented number of preorders for the HTC G1 Android phone, T-Mobile has set up an emulator that allows you to play around with the user interface to get a feel for how it works.
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Ignoring Vista Entirely Is Shortsighted
Maine's skipping Vista, and I'm skipping like a broken record. The government of the state of Maine has joined the burgeoning group of organizations planning to sidestep Windows Vista and go straight from Windows XP to Windows 7. I continue to say that completely ignoring Vista is a shortsighted decision that may cause both usability and security troubles not too far down the line.
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Your Data Is Not Growing
Well, your active data isn't growing, or at least it isn't growing very fast. What is growing is the amount of data that you now hold on to. If you could eliminate that data, your ongoing investment in primary storage would be minimal.
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Green Heating, Power Needed For Green IT
You're familiar with the tired phrase, "eating your own dog food?" Well, I’m here to tell you that I've begun eating my own granola. Rather than simply espouse green computing, if only by tracking eco-friendly developments on the Web, I'm about to launch a green computing experiment in my basement.
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More Features Spotted In iPhone 2.2 Firmware Update
Apple recently gave developers access to a beta version of the upcoming 2.2 firmware upgrade for the iPhone. Several new features have been spotted in the code, including support for emoji icons (addressing a Japanese-specific complaint about the iPhone) and the ability to interact with Google's Street Views.
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BlackBerry Apps Store Details Leaked
Research In Motion's answer to the iPhone Apps Store and the Android Market will be called the BlackBerry Apps Center. Images of it leaked over the weekend and give us some insight into how RIM will compete to provide content for its devices.
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Open Source To The Rescue In Hard Times
It's a spiel that makes a lot of sense on the face of it. Switch to open source and you'll not only save money (who doesn't want to do that?) but guard yourself against the unexpected repercussions of these financially grim days.
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NOAA's Tracking Site Shows Historical Storm Activity
While, as the mutual fund ads always say, past performance is no guarantee of future performance, knowing your area's hurricane history can help you with your Disaster Recovery plan. NOAA's new historical hurricane tracking site displays hurricane and other major storm tracks for past 150 years
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Drop-Testing Drives
I don't know if the it was the heat or just a lack of better things to do, but drop-testing drives seems to have replaced Vespa jousting as the geek sport of the month in August. First Popular Mechanics magazine ran a portable USB hard drive drop test, subjecting several drives to higher and higher drops until they failed. Video here. Then Samsung tossed one of its laptop SSDs off the roof of its building in sillycone valley and, wonder of wonders, it booted the laptop they screwed it into. Video here.
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Microsoft OOXML Controversy Rises Again
Last week, 13 of 23 members of Norway's International Standards Organization (ISO) committee resigned. They were resigning in protest to Norway's official decision to favor Microsoft's OOXML document format as an ISO standard, despite a "no" vote by 21 of 23 committee members. (Microsoft and Statoil were the Norway committee's only two "yes" votes.)
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T-Mobile Struggling To Meet Android Demand
Interest in the HTC G1 appears to be off the charts. In response to a huge number of preorders for the Android handset, T-Mobile is attempting to accommodate everyone. If you want an Android phone, you'd better act quickly.
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Fed Stiffens ID Theft Penalties, Schwarzenegger Kills California Breach Bill
Identity thieves, if a new federal ID theft law is enforced, will now face stiffer federal penalties for their crimes. Federal prosecutors also will have increased leeway to pursue more ID theft cases. Also, for the second time in 12 months, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a new California Data Breach Bill. Was that a good idea?
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RIM CEO: Bold Delay Because Of iPhone 3G
Research In Motion's co-CEO implied the BlackBerry Bold continues to be delayed because it's still being tested to ensure that it doesn't have the same 3G connectivity problems that plagued the iPhone 3G earlier this summer.
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Review: Motorola Pure H15 Bluetooth Headset
I've been using the Motorola Pure H15 Bluetooth headset extensively for the past couple of weeks. It uses Motorola's CrystalTalk technology and some great noise-suppression techniques so you can always hear your conversation. So far, it is the best Bluetooth headset I've used.
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Google: Android Market Will Be More Open Than iPhone Apps Store
During the course of an interview, Google Android pioneer Andy Rubin made sure to say that the Android Market will be a whole different ballgame compared with the iPhone Apps Store. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
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TCP Flaw An Abject Lesson On Responsible Disclosure
The pendulum swing between responsibly disclosing a vulnerability privately to affected vendors so they can create a fix versus telling the world so IT can be aware of potential problems is swinging back into the vendors' favor. The result is that without public awareness, vendors aren't motivated to institute fixes on a timely basis.
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Open Source You Can Use: October Edition
In this edition: Chrome vs. Flock, a new OpenOffice.org release candidate, leaving behind free-as-in-beer, and a tiny open source gem.
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Financial Fallout May Mean Fewer, But Better, Startups
Technology startups could be in for a bumpy ride as the financial crisis hits them from both sides. Venture funding could get -- almost certainly will get -- harder to come by, just as IT departments tighten spending. Here's how some startups will find their way through the mess.
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Replications On A Theme – Host-Based Replication
Disaster recovery is certainly more than getting the data out of your data center and having it land in a remote facility, but that isn't a bad pace to start. Problem is, there are now 800 different ways to replicate data.
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Ballmer: There Will Be No Zune Phone, But Possibly A Phone With Zune
The Zune phone rumor somehow manages to persist even though Microsoft constantly bats it down. A new twist to the story has emerged, however. In a recent interview, Steve Ballmer said that Microsoft is exploring the idea of porting the Zune software to Windows Mobile devices. That would be a step in the right direction.
Continue reading "Ballmer: There Will Be No Zune Phone, But Possibly A Phone With Zune..."
RIM's Touch BlackBerry Next?
With Nokia's touch-screen phone finally made official, the industry is turning its gaze toward Research In Motion. BlackBerry's maker hasn't even officially announced the touch-screen BlackBerry Storm (even though we know a lot about it), but there's already a leaked promo video making its way across the Internet.
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Crook Hires Decoys For Bank Robbery Through Craigslist
About a dozen men who answered a job ad on Craigslist discovered too late that their employer was a bank robber who had hired them to assist his getaway by dressing as decoys.
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The bMighty Financial Crisis Survival Kit
In the face of the Wall Street meltdown, business owners need all the help they can get. So the bMighty Financial Crisis Survival Kit pulls together the latest news and analysis along with strategies, tips, and tricks to help your company weather the storm and emerge poised for the future.
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Google Demos Search Capabilities Of Android
That Google would make search one of the centerpieces of its new Android mobile phone platform should cause everyone to say "Duh." It went to great lengths to provide the means to search literally everything right from the phone. It recently showed off Android's searching prowess in some videos.
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Jim Zemlin's New Linux Conference (And Old Solaris News)
Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation is a little tired of talking about Solaris. I don't blame him. Sad to say, though, when I spoke to him yesterday about the Linux Foundation's new event, LinuxCon, I started by asking him about ... Solaris. Oops?
Continue reading "Jim Zemlin's New Linux Conference (And Old Solaris News)..."
Get The Latest InformationWeek Analytics Audio Report: SOA - Convergence And Consolidation
Get an overview of the state of the changing service-oriented architecture landscape in the latest InformationWeek Analytics Audiobook: SOA: Convergence And Consolidation. Learn about the major SOA technologies and the strengths and weaknesses of the major vendors.
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Nokia's XpressMusic 5800 Touch Phone No iPhone Killer
A glance at the spec sheet for the newly announced XpressMusic 5800 touch phone from Nokia would leave you believing it is an iPhone killer for sure. Sadly, after using it for just a few moments, it's clear that is not the case.
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IT Decision Makers Say Election Will Impact Industry
IT decision makers are split on which presidential candidate is most likely to help the technology industry, and 40% agree that the next person in the White House is likely to impact the information technology industry in several ways.
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The Four Phases Of Bailout Grief
How does one react to the moving target which is Congress's $700-billion bailout plan -- passed Wednesday night by the Senate, now coming before the House of Representatives? Now that the window for quick government action to ease the credit crunch is stretching out, possibly ad infinitum, computer businesses everywhere are going to have to hunker down to ride this thing out. It ain't gonna be easy.
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Google Taps Hollywood Stars To Encourage Voter Registration
The election is just 33 days away. Voter registration deadlines are imminent, with most states cutting off interested voters in the next seven days. With only 3 in 4 eligible Americans registered to vote, Google has teamed up with Hollywood A-Listers to encourage more people to get out there and register.
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More Microsoft Live Search Bribery
First, Microsoft offered you Live Search Cashback for buying products through its product search engine. Now it has Live Search SearchPerks to let you earn points for using lots of different Microsoft products and services. You'll have to act soon, though; it's available only for a limited time.
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Authorities May Know Identity Of Gpcode Author
The author of the so-called ransomware virus Gpcode may have made a serious mistake when he or she recently approached Kaspersky Lab to attempt to sell a tool that would decrypt victims' files.
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HP Acquires LeftHand Networks For $360 million
LeftHand Networks was one of the first vendors in the iSCSI market and has always had the best of the iSCSI solutions that runs on standard x86 server hardware. It has transitioned over the past couple of years from selling whitebox servers with its SAN/iQ software bundled in to primarily selling SAN/iQ as software, upping the ante this February by releasing SAN/iQ as a VMware virtual appliance.
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My Xohm Mobile WiMax Experience, Or The Simpsons At 35 MPH
As I mentioned yesterday, I'm one of Sprint's early Xohm WiMax customers in Baltimore. Today, I took WiMax out for a test drive across town. Literally. The verdict: Fast, but spotty.
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Google: 'Hey, Has Anyone Noticed That WE ROCK?'
A few weeks ago, Gartner recognized companies that are doing well by publishing a report called "Magic Quadrant For E-Mail Security Boundaries." In that report, Gartner gave Google high marks. Google took the time to issue a press release and pat itself on the back.
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Apple Ditches iPhone NDA
Apple had placed a fairly restrictive nondisclosure agreement on certain aspects of the iPhone Apps Store, the iPhone SDK, and what developers for the iPhone could and couldn't say about their own products. After enduring a firestorm of negative feedback over the issue, Apple has changed its NDA policy.
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HP Acquires LeftHand Networks – Here We Go Again
I had a nice blog planned on host-based replication this morning but then I received an e-mail about Hewlett-Packard's plans to purchase LeftHand Networks and I thought "Here we go again." Good thing I cleaned out my in-box, because I have a feeling this entry might fill it back up again.
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Richard Stallman On Cloud Computing: 'Stupidity'
The Sept. 29 edition of The Guardian sports an interview with Richard Stallman -- he of GNU and the Free Software Foundation -- in which he fulminates long and loud against cloud computing. Break out the asbestos suits before reading. Some of his words: "It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign."
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BlackBerry BOLD = Botched OS, Launch Delayed
Holy mackerel. Just when we thought the clouds were lifting and the much-delayed BlackBerry Bold was about to hit store shelves, another setback appears. This time, according to an internal AT&T e-mail, all the Bold retail training sessions set for the month of October have been canceled indefinitely. Should RIM and AT&T bag the Bold?
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