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The InformationWeek December 2008 Archive « November 2008 | Main | January 2009 » |
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Microsoft's Year-End Zune Fail
Users of the 30-GB Zune all over the world awoke this morning to find that it was the day the music died. Although it's still a bit of a mystery why the Zunes failed, the only fix that gets the Zune working right now is an extreme reset that requires disassembling the case to disconnect both the battery and hard drive.
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AIIM Adds Resources For Content Management Neophytes
AIIM, the Association for Information and Image Management, has long been a useful resource for established content management industry professionals as well as organizations just getting started with piecing together a content strategy.
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What Ever Happened To On/Off Switches?
On this last day of 2008, among the many forecasts and prognostications for the next year, I'd like to take a moment to ponder a subtle change that already has occurred.
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Green Stories To Watch In 2009, Part 2
Yesterday, I wrote of five green IT stories worth following in 2009: Energy Star data centers; cap and trade, carbon offsets and RECs; federal business energy tax credits; e-waste; and corporate purchases of green IT equipment. Here are five more:
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Why OpenOffice Is Mired In Sun's Swamp
While I was out getting my fill of Christmas turkey, a brouhaha erupted online about the state of the OpenOffice.org project. One of the developers on the Novell side, Michael Meeks, wrote a widely circulated blog post in which he chastised Sun for its heavy-handed handling of arguably one of the most significant open source projects of our time.
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Cisco Comes To A Home Near You
Cisco is going to launch a new product at the Consumer Electronics Show in January intended to "take on" Apple, Sony, and other brands that sell technology products to regular folks.
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Macworld Puts Its Future In Hands Of Apple Fanboys
With Steve Jobs passing on the January classic and Apple pulling out altogether after next year, the brain trust at IDG is hosting a town hall meeting of Macintosh faithful for suggestions. Is there wisdom in the collective?
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Beating Swords Into Data Centers
Since my previous post about Canadian startup Bastionhost's hosting plan for an underground bunker in Nova Scotia, I’ve been investigating a number of former nuclear fallout shelters that have been converted into data centers.
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T-Mobile Handset Schedule Hits The Tubes
The kid has done it again, as the Boy Genius Report has snagged the upcoming release schedule for T-Mobile. It's packed full of some really cool handsets, including a new BlackBerry, and an 8-megpixel camera phone.
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The (Not Quite) End Of Security On The Internet
Speaking at the 25th annual Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, security researchers showed how they developed a rogue (forged) Certificate Authority digital certificate. Yes, this is a big deal. But no, the Internet isn't broken.
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Top 10 CIO Issues For 2009
Taking for granted that all CIOs want to stay employed in 2009 while helping their companies grow and increase profits and delight customers, our list of 10 top-priority items for CIOs in the coming year offers a blend of the old and the new. Here's our list of the 10 items we think will keep you excited and delighted in 2009.
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Yes, Trust In The PKI Is Broken
The trust in digital certificates relies on the fact that the authority issuing the certificate has validated the identity of the person or company making the request and that the digital certificate can't be forged. New research presented at the 25th Chaos Computer Congress shows that forging digital certificates is possible and practical. Trust in the SSL is now broken.
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Green Stories To Watch In 2009
There have been a lot of warm, fuzzy feelings around green computing in 2008. As a new year begins, expect intense scrutiny as green efforts take shape, including data center metrics, cap-and-trade programs, vendor claims of power-management features, and state and federal legislation. Here are five stories to watch in 2009 (another five to come tomorrow).
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Windows 7: Linux Killer, Or Windows Killer?
The newest installment of Conventional Computer Wisdom holds that Windows 7 will be "a Linux-killer," unseating Linux on netbooks and sealing its fate on the desktop. Well, maybe XP-killer and Vista-killer is more like it.
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Microsoft's Obvious-Patent Insanity
On Christmas, Microsoft filed for yet another one of those crazy patents that seems so obvious you have to wonder why they bother to apply. Aren't patents supposed to be for nonobvious inventions?
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Forrester's Year-Old CIO Outlook: Where's 80/20 Plan?
Thirteen months ago, Forrester's Bobby Cameron offered a summary of his $379 CIO agenda for 2008: become a business change-agent, etc. The summary failed to mention attacking the 80/20 demon, which should be the top priority for CIOs in 2009. Because if they don't undertake that battle, all the other transformation happy-talk will remain just that -- a lot of talk.
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Cloud Computing Security: What About It?
I’m always trolling the Web for insight into the latest technology trends, and how these trends could impact both how we use technology and how it may change how we secure our data. During my pursuit for knowledge, I’ll often run into bone-headed comments and blogs, and when I do, for the most part, I just shrug them off. Today’s experience isn't one of those times.
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Fake iPhone Nanos Pop Up
Well, it's that time of year when we get flooded with iPhone Nano rumors. But this one's a little different in that we're already seeing cases and knockoffs of a nonexistent device. Should Apple bring out an iPhone Nano?
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NMAP Network Scanning: A Must-Have Addition To Your Library
NMAP, the open source network mapping tool, should be in any network or security administrator's toolbox. It's a feature-rich network scanner that goes far beyond port scanning such as service and OS detection, stealth and evasion modes, and sports an internal scripting engine. NMAP Network Scanning, a reference guide written by Gordon Lyon, a.k.a. Fyodor, is a must-have book to get the most out of NMAP.
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Getting Started With Your New iPod Touch
The iPod Touch was a hugely popular gift for Christmas last week. If you got an iPod Touch or iPhone, read on for pointers to our favorite free and cheap iPod Touch apps. And if you didn't get an iPhone or Touch, we have some alternatives for you.
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Microsoft Layoffs Coming?
Despite hiring at a rapid clip for the last few years, even Microsoft may not be immune to the rounds of layoffs hitting the technology industry recently.
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#1 Job Threat Is Technology, Not Globalization
In these high-anxiety times, are you worried your company will send your job overseas? The authors of a new book say you're right to be afraid -– but not of outsourcing. They contend the real job-grinder has been the productivity engine of IT and that fears of outsourcing and other globalization issues are "wildly overblown."
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Infected Digital Picture Frames: They’re Ba’aack
Last January, Insignia had to yank a line of 10.4-inch digital frames from Best Buy due to reports of infection. This year it’s Samsung that has egg on its face.
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Microsoft Keeps Netbooks Small And Weak
Although this doesn't seem to have been a great holiday season for technology in general, I suspect that netbooks will be a bright spot for computer makers. Tiny notebook PCs like the Asus Eee PC, Acer Aspire One, Dell Inspiron Mini 9, and HP Mini 1000 are attracting a lot of attention.
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Ten Excellent Language Translators And Resources
I've spent the last few years attempting to learn German. Initially, I attended German language classes at the Goethe Institute. Last year, I moved to a new city with no Goethe Institute and my schedule made it nearly impossible to find a class that would fit my schedule. Naturally, I turned to the Internet to continue my education, and here are 10 tools to translate content and interact with others who speak German.
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Every Year Bogus Holiday Cards Flood In-Boxes: This Year is No Exception
If your in-box is like mine, you’ve been hit with numerous fake greeting card spams. Who knows what you really get if you click on the link: Phishing attack attempt? A keystroke logger? Worse? Keep it safe.
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Let's Stop This Patent Trolling
It seems like every few months, some obscure company is awarded a patent for some relatively mundane idea, then turns around and sues the companies that have been using it. This time, the incredible and seemingly patentable innovation is icons that update based on document or window content.
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Living With Parallels On Desktop, Server And iPhone
I spend 80% of my work life in a 100% Mac shop. While I’ve used VM solutions from Sun, VMware, and Parallels on Apple hardware for InformationWeek, we've been a Parallels shop at my day job 'cause, frankly, the company was first top market with Mac desktop and server offerings. We’re much happier with this latest rev of Desktop.
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A Service Holiday As The Ultimate Gift
"For sale" is certainly a purchase motivator, but the gift of help -- even if but for a day -- might deliver value far in excess than that revealed by even the deepest price slash.
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Wikipedia Appeals To Readers For $6 Million
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is asking for donations to the nonprofit site. But with more than 150,000 volunteers at his disposal, the question remains: Is it in trouble of folding?
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Gartner: IT Has 'No Moral Basis' To Monitor Facebook Usage
Does your IT team spend any time monitoring Facebook usage by employees? If so, you're just wasting your time and reinforcing the reputation that you and your team are busybodies, says Gartner analyst Brian Prentice. But his argument gets downright weird when he asserts such actions are an attempt "to deny people the right to reclaim a semblance of a personal life."
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iTunes Gives And Gets A Blessing
Apple's iTunes has received a unique endorsement in a marketplace populated by sports and entertainment celebrities: The Vatican has blessed an iPhone app.
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Fighting Click Fraud And Bots From The Heart Of Texas
It’s been a big year for Click Forensics, a company that helps advertisers, agencies, and ad networks recognize and reduce low-quality Web traffic. In addition to naming a new CEO and securing second-round funding, the fraud-fighting startup struck a deal with Google.
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Green IT, Unwrapped
Bookmark this page. Contained herein are some of the more useful links I've come across in 2008. They are by no means exhaustive, but I believe they'll come in handy when you're looking for some eco-answers. They include private-sector sites, government agencies, NGOs, and 501(c)3 sites.
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Initial Thoughts On WordPress 2.7
Back in October, I attended an event where WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg provided a demo of the upcoming WordPress 2.7 release. I captured the demo on video and it has become one of my most popular videos to date. Here are my thoughts on the 2.7 release and why WordPress always seems to think about publishers first.
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Looking Into The Content Management Crystal Ball
I've never been one to make grand predictions about the future of technology, but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy hearing what others have to say. As 2008 comes to a close, a handful of prognosticators are stepping forward to offer up their vision for the future of content management. Here are some of the more interesting lists ...
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Second Zero Day Flaw Nails Microsoft In Two Weeks
For the second time in two weeks, Microsoft is rushing to fix a zero-day vulnerability. This time the flaw is in some versions of the software used to run corporate databases.
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Top 5 Smartphones Of The Year
It's the time of year when you look back at the previous 12 months and like to reflect. In the space I cover, I realized that we've had an incredible year in terms of the number and quality of smartphones. But what handsets were good enough to make my top five list?
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Cloud Maturity Models Don't Make Sense
An issue that's been roiling the cloud computing blogosphere the past few months is the notion of a maturity model for cloud computing, which I oppose. Multiple maturity models (say that three times fast!) already have been defined for a variety of IT subjects, including business processes and at least five or six different ones for SOA, alone.
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Cloud Storage Is About Dispersion
Cloud storage is destined to be one of the hottest markets next year. It is one of those technologies that is actually aided by a down economy. As IT budgets remain flat or decline, the need for storage capacity will accelerate. The ability to buy that storage as you need it instead of all at once will be interesting. Additionally, Web 2.0 and other Internet-enabled services are supposed to continue to thrive, and all these will need storage as well.
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The Five Biggest Phone Stories Of 2008
Here's a list of the five phones that generated the most buzz in the world of mobility. See who makes the cut and who doesn't.
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Proposed EPA Green Guidelines Lend Credibility
The U.S. EPA has proposed five changes to its Green Power Partnership program that will affect how Intel, Cisco, and other large purchasers of renewable energy credits (RECs) are credited. The five changes, proposed to take effect on Feb. 13, 2009, lend credibility and accountability to green efforts.
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iPhone Nano: The Rumor That Just Won't Die
It's baaaaaaaaaaack! Yep, rumors of the iPhone Nano refuse to go away. Last week we saw some mock-ups of possible iPhone Nano cases. This week we get full-blown images of the iPhone Nano. It is real, or another Photoshop job?
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Holly-Dazed: Google Gives Employees The G1 Android Phone Instead Of Bonuses
Bonus? What bonus? Rather than handing out cash to employees, Google has given (only 85%) of its workers the HTC G1 Android phone for the holidays. Generous or Scrooge-y?
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Quick Take: Check Point Frees Nokia To Be Nokia
To IT security industry watchers, the move announced today that Check Point Software Technologies is acquiring Nokia's security business is no shocker. And perhaps it will enable Check Point to start doing what it should have been doing all along: innovating more.
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Toshiba Adds OpenSolaris To Its Notebook Lineup
OpenSolaris may not be unseating Linux any time soon, but file this one under the "small steps" category: Toshiba's apparently working with Sun to offer OpSol as a preload on '09 laptops.
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Larry Ellison: Oracle DB Machine 'Most Successful Intro Ever'
Oracle last week gave some dazzling performance details from two customers evaluating its new hardware/software Database Machine, and CEO Larry Ellison called it the most successful Oracle product intro ever in terms of "pipeline growth and pipeline size." Will Oracle be able to convince budget-strapped CIOs to convert that pipeline interest into actual purchases?
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What We Can Learn From Werner Vogels
To be recognized as InformationWeek's chief of the year, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has obviously done a few things right. Following are five takeaways for other IT pros.
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Garmin: Oh, You Mean THAT Android Phone?!?
Updated: This morning, the Internet was rife with reports that Garmin, maker of GPS equipment, will be releasing phones based on Google's Android operating system in the latter half of 2009. Is it, or isn't it?
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Report: 2008 Mobile Web Use Grew 463%
Opera Software issued its last "State of the Mobile Web" report today for 2008. What do the numbers tell us? Social networking is popular, the mobile Web is growing by leaps and bounds, and smartphones are leading the way.
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Add Value Or Get Out Of The Way
Through Ed Bott's blog, I learned that Nvidia has finally released drivers for its notebook-based video chipsets. To be more specific, they are releasing drivers that can be downloaded directly from the Nvidia site, rather than making users find a driver at the web site of the notebook PC maker.
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Bill Gates: Telling Him A Joke But Butchering The Punch Line
The Comdex keynote crowd of 20,000 roared as Bill Gates, besieged by the Justice Department, called out brazenly, "Anybody out there know a good lawyer joke?" So the next morning at a private meeting with Gates, I said hello and then -- against my better judgment -- asked, "Still looking for a good lawyer joke?" Bill hesitated a second and then said sure, go ahead -- and moments later I went down in flames as I told the joke but butchered the punch line.
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Two Predictions For 2009
As 2008 comes to a close, I'd like to share predictions for the technology space in 2009. The predictions are: more utility-based Web applications will launch and mobile usage will grow but content won't be monetized.
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Print Media Giants Evolve Into Online-Only Models
As more household names from print make the migration to the Web, it will be more critical than ever for them to focus on certain principles that lay the foundation for a successful site. From my point of view, there are three basic things they need to get right: the content itself, the design, and the content management tools.
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Has Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Got Us Anywhere?
As we noted earlier this week, Microsoft learned of a vulnerability in IE 7 on "Patch Tuesday," Dec. 9, and had a fix published for download eight days later. Now, Microsoft's Michael Howard, from the security engineering team, takes an interesting look at the lessons learned.
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Dell CIO: In Search Of Infrastructure Management Innovation
I spoke with Dell CIO Steve Schuckenbrock today, who said this about the $1.2 trillion a year companies spend on IT infrastructure. One-third is on hardware, where Moore's Law relentlessly drives improvement. The other two-thirds is spent managing infrastructure, and there's "no innovation to speak of" in that arena. Too harsh?
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Oracle's Larry Ellison On 'Series Of Wins Vs. Salesforce'
Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison yesterday told financial analysts that Oracle's latest quarter was "conspicuous" for a "series of competitive wins versus Salesforce.com," including "our largest deal ever of salesforce-on-demand, or cloud computing, or whatever you want to call it." Will that head-to-head competition lead to a buyers' market for CIOs?
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Holdren Brings Reason, Science To Obama
John Holdren, professor of environmental policy at Harvard University and director of the Woods Hole Research Center, will bring a principled, reasoned approach to the White House as science adviser to President-elect Barack Obama. Holdren, who also serves as co-chair of the independent National Commission on Energy Policy, is expected to be named to the post tomorrow, according to a Harvard Kennedy School official Web site.
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Google Bakes A 'Cupcake' For Android
If you're wondering when Android is going to make the next leap in functionality, wonder no longer. A new update to the Android platform, called "cupcake," brings with it more than some simple bug fixes. New features galore will be baked into the OS, as well. Guess what, Apple? Android is getting cut-and-paste and video recording before the iPhone!
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YouTube Goes High-Def
I recently uploaded a video to YouTube and noticed something different. Once my video was processed, the video player showed my 4:3 aspect ratio video set into a 16:9 frame. High-definition videos have finally arrived on YouTube.
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Is Microsoft's IE Patch A Retroactive Brand Fix?
Microsoft reacted to the latest IE flaw with an emergency patch earlier this week, but does fixing the software retroactively repair the damage to its brand?
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200X: Year Of The Linux Argument
In no less than two days I've read a flurry of articles pooh-poohing the Linux desktop as a veritable delusion and a fairy story -- something to tell young GTK+ coders before you tuck them in at night. It isn't the year of the Linux desktop; it's the year of the Linux catfight.
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Is The BlackBerry Storm A Success Or Not?
Scattered reports across the Internet claim that the BlackBerry Storm is being returned in droves. Verizon Wireless insists that the Storm is "its best-selling device." Which is the truth?
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SEC's Former CIO Sought Preemptive Safeguards
Exactly four years ago tomorrow, the former CIO of the now-embattled agency told InformationWeek that one of his top priorities was to enable the SEC "to look over the hills and around the corners to spot problems before they become problems." That objective looks eerily prescient this week as we realize the scope of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme.
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Microsoft, Yahoo, Google: Failing To Forget
Computers can be great at remembering things. Sometimes too great. The major search engine providers are competing to remember your search terms for the shortest possible period. Or at least that's what they are saying publicly. There seem to be loopholes in this competition for the shortest data retention, and in some cases I'm actually glad for that.
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New York Times Cites Digg, Del.icio.us In Shutdown Of Its Bookmarking Service
Earlier this afternoon, The New York Times issued an e-mail to all users that it's shutting down its Times-branded bookmarking service (Times File). The e-mail (shown below) cites the proliferation of social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious in its decision to eliminate the offering. The e-mail goes on to say that a process has been established to help existing Times File users move all of their bookmarks into LookSmart's Furl bookmarking service (the technology on which Times File is based).
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One Way To Settle The TechCrunch-Fueled Dispute Over Embargoes
Warning: This is an inside-baseball post about tech bloggo-journalism. In all likelihood, if you're not a tech journalist or blogger, you'll wonder where people get the time to contemplate things so trivial.
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Is There Anything Twitter Can't Do?
As Twitter has grown in popularity, the number of ways this communication tool can be used are endless. No more is it just about telling your friends what you had for lunch or that your makeup won't stay in place for your video blog. No sir! Twitter has so many uses that I'm wondering, is there anything that it can't be used for?
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Robbing Peter To Poison Paul
Computer makers may be robbing Peter to poison Paul. Recent articles published by the American Chemical Society found that decabromodiphenyl ethane (deBDethane), an additive flame retardant marketed as a replacement for decabromodiphenyl ether (decaBDE), has been showing up worldwide in waterbirds, red pandas, and sewage sludge.
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T-Mobile, Anxious To Retain Customers, Drops Upgrade Fee
There's nothing quite like getting a new cell phone. You may not mind the cost of the new phone or the service, but getting hit by that "upgrade fee" stinks. Beginning Dec. 17, that's something T-Mobile customers no longer have to worry about.
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Security Threats Aren't Mitigated By Details
Good security programs start with asking the right questions. All too often, security and network engineers sweat the details of some security technology or other and don't examine the most likely sources of attack. I recently overhead the question "How long should I set an IPSec VPN rekey time interval?" Answer the question by asking how worried you are about an attacker breaking into your VPN and how that might be accomplished.
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OpenOffice.org 3 Goes Portable At Last
After an extended period of debugging and testing, OpenOffice.org 3's finally been officially released in a PortableApps edition. For those who always wanted to give OpenOffice.org a spin without actually installing it, this is the way to go.
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My Top Tech Accomplishments Of 2008: Year Of Twitter, Facebook, Quad Core
I can't recall a year where the technological center of gravity was more personal-facing -- and less business-oriented -- than 2008. Sure, virtualization, server consolidation, SaaS, and enhanced mobility emerged as offering true enterprise value. Yet many of us spent our days messing around with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, all the while convincing ourselves that we were doing it out of a selfless desire to benefit our employers!
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NYC Goes 3-D In Google Earth
The Google Earth team has been hard at work improving the 3-D map of New York City. The new renderings of the city, complete with buildings and textures, is nothing short of amazing.
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SEC CIO's First Week: Madoff Scandal Breaks
Talk about a tough first week on the job: just as investors and many others began intensely scrutinizing the SEC for its role (or lack thereof) in allowing the Madoff investment scandal to happen, Charles Boucher started his new career as CIO of the SEC. As they say, be careful what you wish for -- you might get it.
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Report: Only 44% Of iPhones Using 3G To Surf Web
Some new metrics were recently made available by AdMob, and an interesting statistic popped up. Wi-Fi is being used by 56% of iPhone users to surf the Web rather than a cellular wireless network. What gives?
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PBwiki Leads The Hosted Wiki Pack
Few tools are as effective as a wiki when an organization needs to quickly post and collaborate on content. Dozens of free and paid options for creating a wiki exist, but when it comes to quickly and easily creating a wiki with minimal technical headaches, I keep coming back to PBwiki.
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Podcast: With 'Cloud' In Vogue, Suddenly Appistry Is 'Cloud.' Co-Founder Bob Lozano Explains
Just because the terminology "cloud computing" is in vogue and has become the hottest topic to hit IT in a long time doesn't necessarily give every vendor the creative license to say, "we're cloud computing, too!" Or does it?
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Linux's '09 Outlook: Everywhere, Even On Windows Machines
It sounded like a wild hook for a story, to put it mildly: In 2009, it is said, Linux will ship on more PCs than Windows. So I sat down with Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation to explain his reasoning behind such a statement. He did, and I learned about great many other forward-looking insights for Linux in '09, too.
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Much Ado Over Microsoft's (Somewhat) Rare Out-Of-Band Patch
My advice: Patch this puppy, and don't worry about whether or not Microsoft should have published this update out of its normal monthly update cycle.
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Hitting Google Where It Hurts
Since the beginning of the month, both Microsoft and Yahoo have been hitting Google where it hurts: in its privacy policy.
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How Storage Latency Affects Performance
A few entries ago I introduced the subject of latency as impedance to storage performance. The biggest area of concern is what impact storage latency has on application performance. This is an area where solid state disk (SSD) solutions can make a difference that standard mechanical drive solutions struggle to solve.
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The Difference Between A Business And A Family
Lots of businesses claim to be "just like a family." It's a good bet they don't really mean it.
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IT Jobs Will Be Hot With Obama In The White House
There's a little more than a month before President-elect Barack Obama gets sworn in. Based on the hints he's provided so far about his economic stimulus plans and other programs, some pundits are predicting that demand for IT jobs will take off, especially in key sectors.
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Dr. Strangelovian Data Center In Nova Scotia
Canadian startup Bastionhost this week announced plans to build a secure campus of data centers that will be headquartered in an underground nuclear fallout shelter on the outskirts of Truro, Nova Scotia.
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EMC's Decho Gets CEO
Harel Kodesh gets to pull double duty as Decho CEO and president of EMC's cloud business.
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Would You Want To Be Buried With Your BlackBerry?
According to MSNBC, more and more people under the age of 40 are expressing the desire to take certain things with them into the afterlife -- or at least into the ground when their time comes. That includes -- yes, it's true -- things such as BlackBerrys.
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Metal Gear Comes To iPhone
There's been a lot of talk about Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch becoming a major player in the mobile gaming market. Expect those talks to get a bit louder as the handset has just snagged some major titles, including Metal Gear Solid. But, should Nintendo and Sony be shaking in their boots?
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Critical Internet Explorer Patch Available
In an unusual move, Microsoft has issued a patch for all versions of Internet Explorer from v5.5 onward and for all versions of the Windows operating system. Time to roll out that out-of-band patch before your users get infected. Reports of users being exploited are rising.
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Don't Expect A Netbook -- Or Steve Jobs -- At Macworld
Two things you shouldn't expect to see at the Macworld Conference & Expo this year: Steve Jobs, and a netbook computer. Apple announced this week that Jobs will break tradition and not deliver a Stevenote. That's a fact. Meanwhile, Ezra Gothheil, analyst at Technology Business Research, predicts that Apple will launch a $599 "netbook" notebook computer at the January conference. That's speculation -- and I think it's wrong, too.
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Motorola Cuts Costs As Leaked Phone Pix Hit The Web
Motorola today announced a host of cost-cutting measures, including putting the kibosh on raises for 2009 and dropping some 401(k) contributions. This dour news comes on the same day that leaked pictures of (dare I say "sexy"?) new phones splash across the Internet.
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Free Software Foundation's Richard Stallman Says Don't Call It 'Open Source'
GNU guru Richard Stallman sent me an e-mail the other day complaining that we erred by saying that the Free Software Foundation, of which he's president, promotes open source software. "We have never supported the idea of 'open source' because that idea denies the importance of users' freedom," he writes. Read on for the dizzying semantics behind Richard's argument, and why I think his obsessive attempts at language control are shooting his own software objectives in the foot.
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Google's Gmail Labs Adds Ability To Turn E-Mails Into Docs
Google continues to increase the functionality of its Gmail program. The latest enhancement allows Gmail users to take e-mails and automatically turn them into Google Docs.
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CEO 'You're Fired' Threat, Part 2: McKinsey Pushes Maintenance Cuts
Just three days after we posted our "Letter From CEO: Cut Maintenance To 60% Or You're Fired," McKinsey has released a big study saying that CEOs, CIOs, and other executives want to spend 40% of IT budgets on customer-focused investments but can't find the cash to do so. Enough already: it's time for CIOs to declare all-out war on the 80/20 monster.
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Recession Helping, Not Hurting, Green IT, Surveys Find
Corporate purchases of green IT equipment will remain fairly strong amid the economic crisis, separate reports from IDC, Forrester Research, and Panel Intelligence indicate. These will not be purchases made in spite of the recession, though -- they will be made because of it.
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Microsoft, Please Remove This Junk
A dangerous Internet Explorer exploit has pushed Microsoft to do an out-of-cycle patch. If the complete-system-ownage aspect of the bug isn't scary enough, there are already several exploits floating around on the Internet, even being served out as malicious ads on reputable sites.
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Dell Simplicity Involves Complicated Names
Sunday newspaper inserts from Dell last week proudly declared, "Depend on Dell for simple solutions in tough times." But don't expect the product names to be any help.
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Palamida's Open Source Hit Parade
Palamida's a firm that sells consultancy services for open source software, so it's not exactly a surprise that it would be listing "25 Hot Open Projects You Should Be Using Now To Save Money" in its recent report on the open source outlook for IT in 2009. It has posted the list at its blog with the headline "In A Time Of Less, Do More With Open Source."
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Sprint Touts Mobile Phones As Way To Cut Costs
Sprint recently conducted a survey of U.S. consumers about the value represented by mobile phones. Some of the ways people are cutting costs in response to the current economic climate include killing their landlines, switching to mobile family plans, and defecting to find the best savings.
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Who's Doing UC Now?
Allan Sulkin's latest No Jitter feature details the results of Allan's third annual survey of North American consultants, and the results I found most intriguing had to do with the consultants' experiences and opinions regarding Unified Communications.
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'Illegal, Unethical, Untrustworthy' Clouds
When word got out that medical researchers were contemplating ways to employ cloud computing, privacy rights watchdog Deborah Peel sounded an alarm. Is Peel right to be worried? Or does this potential storm cloud have a HIPAA-compliant lining?
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Bernie Madoff On Video: 'It's Virtually Impossible To Violate Rules'
Yes, here's the guy who swindled $50 billion proclaiming on camera just a year ago that it's impossible to violate scores of SEC rules -- even though he was doing exactly that -- and that "this is something the general public doesn't understand." Read on to check out the certified brass-pair video excerpt from Madoff in an excellent post by my colleague Kerry Massaro of Advanced Trading.
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Palm Gets Jealous, Opens Software Store
Following the footsteps of nearly everyone else, Palm has decided to jump into the software distribution fray with its own storefront. The new Software Store from Palm is available for both Windows Mobile and Palm OS-based handsets and has more than 5,000 titles ready to download.
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Who Am I Now? Matching Your Persona To The Medium
The rules of social networking get hazy when your business and personal lives intersect online.
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Google Gives Android A Map Editor
The new application for Android phones allows users to create and share maps directly on the handset, as well as synchronize them with their PC.
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IEEE, Cisco, Juniper Squeezing Energy Efficiency From Networks
Two-thousand-nine is shaping up to be a watershed year for energy efficiency on data networks. Often overlooked among the eco-conscious, information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as those used in networking products, contribute at least 2% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.
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Battery Life Still Bane Of Apple iPhone User Experience
I love/hate my iPhone. Enjoy the call quality, Safari browsing, iPod listening, iTunes Store applicationing, and e-mail accessing (especially the Microsoft Outlook sync). But all of that is marred by the constant suspicion -- verified by my obsessive checks of the battery indicator -- that the thing will be fully drained of juice well before my day runs out of work.
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Making The Web - And Your Content - More Accessible
Last week, after a long process of drafting and refining the documents, W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative released the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0). It's been nine years since the guidelines have been updated, and while the technology behind Web sites has vastly changed, the basic need for accessibility hasn't.
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Apple V. iPhone Hackers: Round 827,045
Today, Apple issued software update 10.5.6 for its Leopard operating system. Included in the code was a covert strike against iPhone jailbreakers. Users who've installed 10.5.6 can no longer use the Pwnage tool to jailbreak their iPhones.
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OS X Users: Apple Unleashes Security Updates
Colleague Paul McDougall covered the release of Apple's OS X 10.5.6 update, which includes 36 new fixes. We're now taking a look at the security updates, and there are quite a few. Many are critical to get patched.
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Innovate Or Try Again
"If we don't innovate, we're going to die." That's how Robert Egger, creative director at Specialized Bicycles, put it last year in the Google-sponsored Innovate or Die Pedal-Powered Machine Contest.
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Content Management Problem? That May Be A Good Sign
Collaboration has such a lovely "let 1,000 flowers bloom" ring to it. IT teams know it means pulling a lot of weeds, too, but it sure beats the alternative.
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Garmin's Nuvifone Passes FCC
For those of you who can still remember that Garmin plans to offer a smartphone, you'll be happy to know it should be on the market shortly as it just passed the FCC. But I don't think I'm out of line by asking if anyone cares about the Nuvifone anymore?
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Gartner: Will Cloud Displace Internal IT Services For Data Centers?
Gartner Group's Tom Bittman writes, "While that does not mean that the majority of all IT services will be handled in the cloud, it does show that the number of large organizations using some cloud services could be growing rapidly." How do you think you and your company stack up? Read on for highlights of Gartner's top-line findings.
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Will Either Steve Jobs Or An iPhone Nano Appear At Macworld 2009?
Macworld 2009 is but a few weeks away and Apple CEO Steve Jobs has not yet been confirmed as a presenter. In addition, reports surfaced recently that Apple will use Macworld 2009 to introduce the iPhone Nano. Will either be on hand come January?
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Open Source Business Model Is 'Broken.' Really?
Stuart Cohen declared in the Dec. 1 issue of BusinessWeek: "Open Source, The Model Is Broken." I disagree. Open source was never a business model per se, any more than it was a programmer's religion, despite the fervor that sometimes surrounds it. Rather, it was, and is, a better way to develop and distribute software.
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Bailout Watch: HP Ex-CEO Carly Fiorina Says Something Smart
I've never been a huge fan of ex-Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, but I sure admired her performance Sunday on NBC's Meet The Press. Discussing the sinking economy, Carly cut through the clutter -- and put Mitt Romney's won't-let-you-get-a-word-in-edgewise performance to shame -- by succinctly identifying the root of our ongoing problem: It's the unavailability of credit, stupid!
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FSF Vs. Cisco: Are The Gloves Coming Off?
Looks like Cisco and the Free Software Foundation are about to come to real legal blows. The FSF filed a lawsuit this morning alleging that some Linksys brand routers use FOSS without properly releasing the source code for same. What's going on here?
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Books Or Bits For Crowd-Sourced Content?
I've got two books sitting in front of me, sort of. The first is Martin C. Strong's Great Rock Discography, 7th edition, with every track and every piece of vinyl waxed by 1,200 major artists. The other is the Web site Discogs.com, the "crowd-sourced" / Web 2.0 / pick-your-buzzword discography site that sports millions of discs by millions of artists. I rely on the latter often, but I keep the former on my shelf. So which will it be: books or bits, or both?
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Google Calls The Wall Street Journal 'Confused'
The Wall Street Journal ran a story last night suggesting that Google has been trying to convince network operators to give its traffic preference to that of others. If true, the idea would have been a serious blow to the idea of Net neutrality. Google says the Journal got it wrong.
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Internet Explorer XML Flaw Attacks Heat Up
At first, we thought the XML exploits targeting the flaws discussed in Microsoft Security Advisory 961051 affected only Internet Explorer 7. However, many more versions of IE are affected, and exploits are moving in the wild.
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One Year Of Golf And Novels Is Plenty, CIO Says
Richard Rzasa spent 24 years in IT on Wall Street, culminating in a high-profile CIO role at TD Waterhouse before it was acquired by Ameritrade. Rzasa left the job market for a while to golf, read, and refresh, but then realized he missed the rush of the CIO world. So he's back in the game and savoring a very different CIO challenge, according to Greg MacSweeney of Wall Street & Technology.
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Five Ways To Manage Your Finances Online
As the U.S. economy continues to slow, I am often asked for advice on selecting an online financial management tool. Here are five tools that can help you completely manage your finances and find ways to save more and spend less. Some of the tools provide a social networking layer which can tap into help from your friends and family on financial management.
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Microsoft Comes To Its Sensors
Lately we've seen some really interesting applications that depend on devices that have sensor hardware such as accelerometers, light sensors, touch sensors, and global positioning system receivers. Most of the innovation has been on mobile devices such as the iPhone. With Windows 7, Microsoft is trying to make sure it won't miss this party.
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CHP Halves Home Energy Bill, Cuts CO2 By 40%
So, it turns out Oak Ridge National Labs and I are on the same page when it comes to alternative energy. The lab just released a bullish report on the benefits of cogeneration (combining heat and power) systems, while I just received my first energy bill since installing a CHP system in my home: I cut my November energy bill by more than half and reduced my CO2 emissions by 40%.
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Solid-State Drives In The Data Center
It's no secret that data centers are power-hungry beasts. Here are some widely acknowledged facts about the current energy consumption of data centers:
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Google Chrome For Mac Is Available (Sort Of)
If you use Mac OS X and are dying to try Google's Chrome browser, you can, provided you have the technical chops to compile your own applications and the patience to deal with programs that crash a lot. The partially completed code is available at the Chromium Web site.
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Estonia To Vote By Cell Phone
If you dream of using your cell phone to avoid going to a polling place for the next election, you may want to move to Estonia. Thanks to new legislation regarding its 2011 election, the country will be the first to vote by mobile phone.
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'Pull My Finger' App Approved For The iPhone By Apple
The gloves are off. Apple has decided apps publishers who want to have a little bit of fun should be allowed their day in the sun. I just received an e-mail from the creator of the Pull My Finger application. Read what he has to say.
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Gmail Gets A Twitter Gadget
If you've been keeping up with all the new features in Gmail, you know that it now has the ability to send text messages directly to cell phones as well as conduct video chats. Now, available through Google Labs, is a new gadget that lets you sign into and use Twitter from within Gmail.
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Microsoft's Next Dabble In Open Source: Oxite
It sounds like the name of an over-the-counter drug, doesn't it? Oxite's actually the name of a Microsoft content management platform that runs on .NET and has been released under the OSI-approved MPL. What I'm wondering is how it will shape up against other solutions where the whole stack's open, not just the top.
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Problems Reported Between Obama Transition Team And NASA's Griffin
President-elect Barack Obama's transition team is rumored to be having some trouble with NASA.
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Letter From CEO: Cut Maintenance To 60% Or You're Fired
So Pat the CIO gets the annual year-in-review letter from the CEO that precedes their formal performance-review meeting and the opening paragraph is a doozy: "Pat -- You did some great things in 2008 with mobile apps, data-center consolidation, and SLAs but you failed to cut maintenance from 80% of IT spending to 60% so I'm not sure you're the right person for this job. Prove me wrong by May, or I'll have to let you go."
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450 LBS Of Love From EqualLogic
Long-time readers know that a Dell iSCSI array currently lies at the heart of our virt lab. Our December wishes came true when Dell offered us not one, but two updated arrays just in time for the holidays.
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Why So Little Buzz Surrounding Windows 7?
When Microsoft does something funky -- like CEO Steve Ballmer's infamous Monkey Dance -- the press can't get enough of it. Yet when the folks in Redmond act inspired, the publicity is apparently somewhat sparser. That sure seems to be the case surrounding Windows 7. My early tests of the operating system, which will succeed Vista in about a year, indicate that it's a solid, high-performing, great-looking platform. So why aren't we hearing more about it?
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Lenovo Mobile Churns Out An Android Phone
Looks like the Android platform is slowly beginning to pick up steam. We recently learned that Australia will see the world's second Android phone in early 2009. Now, Lenovo Mobile has jumped into the game and will make the world's third Android phone. Too bad it will only be available in China.
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Google's Blogger Adds Geotagging Tool
Aside from the writing I do here for InformationWeek, I have a personal blog covering music. I often live-blog from concerts, take pictures, and write up reviews of concerts directly from my phone. Thanks to a new tool in Blogger, I'll be able to geotag my posts so my readers will know exactly where the show took place.
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Alfresco And Joomla Launch Industry's First CMIS Implementation
Alfresco continues to blaze the trail when it comes to real-world implementations of the proposed Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. Its latest step forward was the release this week of a module that allows integration between Alfresco and Joomla systems.
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Free Software To Protect Virtual Machines In The Cloud: Third Brigade VMware Protection
There are some ways to effectively begin securing your information in the cloud. We've recently been pondering whether or not one can prove compliance with security and privacy regulations in the cloud. Luckily, while cloud services still may not be right for handling health or payment card information, security vendors and cloud service providers are beginning to offer ways to effectively secure your cloud-based computing resources and satisfy some compliance requirements.
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bMighty bOptimized: IT Infrastructure Virtual Event Now Available On Demand
bMighty.com's latest virtual event -- a "deep dive on IT infrastructure for growing companies" -- is a wrap, but now you can check out the whole thing any time you want.
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Did You Know RIM Won An Oscar?
That's right, the maker of BlackBerry won an Academy Award in 1998 for a digital film bar-code reader. This was just one of the many facts I didn't know about Research In Motion, but an upcoming book is chock-full of so much BlackBerry goodness that it should satisfy the most ardent CrackBerry addict.
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Demand Response Pays Data Centers To Be Flexible
Brother, can you spare a kilowatt? If you can, EnerNOC and other demand response service providers are willing to pay you handsomely for it.
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Google Chrome: A Point of Departure
Google Chrome officially got ratcheted up to a 1.0 release earlier today. The feature set may be meager compared with Firefox (e.g.: no plug-ins, yet), but it's only a starting point. And not just for something to be decked out with plug-ins, either.
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Can Palm Reboot At CES 2009?
Yesterday, I received an e-mailed invitation from Palm's media relations team to a press conference that Palm is holding at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next month. The tag line reads: "Come to see all that Palm New-ness you've been waiting for." New what? New operating system? New hardware? New direction? Hopefully, all of the above.
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Half Of CIOs Fail To Show Business Value, Study Says
A recently released study on CIO leadership revealed that 51% of CIOs "have developed business-value indicators that link IT performance metrics and business goals." That means 49% are failing to make and communicate this absolutely critical connection. How can those 49% expect to keep their jobs if they're not proving they deserve to keep them?
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Tech Companies Outline White House Steps For Safer Internet
Several technology giants have backed a plan to increase cybersafety. A group, whose membership includes AOL, AT&T, Cisco, Google, and MySpace, to name a few, has released a list of online safety recommendations for President-elect Barack Obama's administration.
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Elephant Drive Best Bet For Xdrive Users
While online backup vendors like SpiderOak are offering discounts for displaced Xdrive users and AOL lists Dropbox, Carbonite and Box.net along with Elephant Drive as replacements for Xdrive users I agree with Matt K Olsen who commented on my last blog post on this issue the Elephant Drive was the best replacement for Xdrive users.
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Android Goes Borg, Assimilates The HTC Touch
I've been waiting for this to happen. Some intrepid tinkerers have figured out how to port the Android operating system to smartphone hardware other than the officially sanctioned HTC G1. The HTC Touch, it turns out, runs Android quite well. How long before Android goes all-out and starts to assimilate other handsets?
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President-Elect Barack Obama Offers InfoSec Bailout Plan
While the president-elect may not realize it's what he's working on -- he is. And savvy security vendors already should be revamping their marketing plans for the InfoSec Stimulus Package of 2009.
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Why Apple Doesn't Need You
This is an era where the conversation with customers is critical, or so we're told. So why is Apple arguably the hottest company around?
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My Pizza Man Builds An Intel Core i7 PC
I went down to my local pizzeria to get a couple of slices and a Diet Coke, and I ended up in a discussion with the owner about Intel's latest quad-core chips. Turns out the pizza guy is building a PC with Intel's new Core i7 processor and Asus's P6T motherboard. Hey, seems you don't have to be an overly-computer-focused engineering guy like yours truly (please don't call me a geek) to put together a hot system on your own. Who knew?
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More On Ethics And Morals
In response to my recent column on ethics and morals, I received a note from Michael Josephson, principal of the Josephson Institute of Ethics, whose survey of high schoolers I referenced in the column. That survey's main findings: A majority of students said they had cheated on a test within the past year; 30% admitted to having stolen from a store; 23% said they had stolen from a parent or other relative; yet 93% said they were satisfied with their own ethics and character.
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Boston Power: Green Laptops Today, Electric Cars Tomorrow?
Now that Boston Power will be putting its Sonata line of lithium-ion batteries into Hewlett-Packard's Enviro Series of notebooks, how long until it announces a partnership with a car company?
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Google Brings SMS Feature Back To Google Chat
Remember how Google added the ability to send SMS messages to cell phones from within Google Chat...and then pulled it? Well, the feature is back, and this time for good.
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The bMighty.com 2008 SMB Innovation Awards
The first annual bMighty.com Innovation Awards recognize a dozen products released this year that hold special appeal for growing businesses -- and for everyone else, too.
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E-Discovery Partnerships Go For Gold
Vendors are teaming up to tackle e-discovery -- and rake in cash.
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Won't Steal Corporate Data? You're In The Minority
The bad news on insider threats keeps getting worse: most respondents to a new database-security study think such attacks will accelerate in 2009 and that insiders will most likely be behind them. Yesterday I noted the huge risks from employees wanting some "insurance" in case they get laid off; today's culprits appear to be a mix of shortsighted budgeting, ignorance, and incompetence.
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Stop A/V Components From Overheating, Canadian Style
Feeling a moral and civic obligation to stimulate the economy, I finally took the plunge into home theater. Have you seen those prices lately? $599 for a 42-inch Panasonic plasma? I'm so there. But I didn't want my savings eaten up by expensive cabinetry designed to separate components. Enter this little invention from up north.
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Nortel Network Shares Hit Record Lows
Nortel Networks' shares dropped more than 28% in trading Wednesday, to 37 cents a share, before regaining a meager .0016 per share. Ouch!! That's pretty bad news.
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Microsoft's Billion-Dollar Cloud Business
Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's $18.9 billion Business Division, this week reiterated a bold prediction about the future of Microsoft's software-as-a-service business. Microsoft foresees half of Exchange, SharePoint, and Dynamics CRM revenue coming from online versions of those products within five years.
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A Little Chat With Microsoft On Open Source Platform Strategy
Yesterday I headed into Manhattan to meet with folks from Microsoft's Platform Strategy group, another major division of Microsoft slowly edging the company away from behemoth-dom and towards fairer play for both proprietary and open source. Slow but steady may well win this race.
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Was MySQL 5.1 Ready For Release? Its Users Will Decide
The author of MySQL, Monty Widenius, has taken a shot at Sun's release of MySQL 5.1, saying it wasn't ready yet, and pointed an accusatory finger at Marten Mickos, senior VP of Sun databases. He's also not bothered to deny rumors that's he's resigned from Sun. I don't know about the rumors, but it's clear to me that Elvis has left the building.
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Google Brings Street Views To S60 And Windows Mobile
Google made a new version of its Maps for Mobile available today for the Windows Mobile and S60 platforms. The major upgrade included in version 2.3 is support for Street Views in Maps for Mobile.
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Finding New IT Work Is Getting A Lot Tougher
Is your IT organization hiring? If so, you'll likely be getting a flood of resumés soon. A new report says that there's been a pretty recent sharp decline in hiring plans by IT organizations for the next six months.
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Free App Gives iPhone Cheap-O International Calls
Using mobile phones to call phones in other countries can be pricey. Truphone believes in cheap international calling and is bringing that power to the iPhone with its new application. Truphone Anywhere works in 33 countries and charges as little as 4 cents per minute by passing calls through the Internet.
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Video: How To Plug Into The Cloud
In preparation for InformationWeek's "How-To Guide To Cloud Computing," I set up my own account with Amazon Web Services. The process took about three minutes. I now know enough to be dangerous.
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Why Isn't Microsoft's Visual Studio Branding A Game?
An ad campaign for Visual Studio (which appeared in the print version of this magazine, among others) looks like a screen capture from a video game, only it isn't. I think it should have been.
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Final Release Of Google's Chrome Ready For Prime Time?
In a recent interview, Google VP Marissa Mayer commented that the company's Chrome browser will be exiting beta status and be offered as a 1.0 release. What say ye, Chrome users, is it good enough?
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Poznan Dispatch: Carbon Bashing
Think you've had a rough week? Try being a carbon credit. Here's what happened in just a few days: First, the price of Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs), used by carbon traders, tanks. Then, the U.S. Government Accountability Office issues a report questioning the efficacy of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme and Kyoto Protocol in slowing carbon emissions growth. And finally, U.N. climate officials in Poznan find themselves on the defensive explaining why a flawed carbon-trading tool, the Clean Development Mechanism, or CDM, shouldn't be scrapped altogether.
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Microsoft Launches Oxite, An Open Source Content Management System
A new, open source web content management system hit the scene this past week, making its debut as the engine behind Visitmix.com. But what sets Oxite apart isn't its feature set, but rather the development team behind it - Microsoft.
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Linux Defenders: A Little Help From Our Friends
The newest chapter in the ongoing saga of patents-and-Linux tackles the whole issue from an entirely new direction: empowering the process of prior art discovery. It's a smart approach, especially since real patent reform is still years to decades away.
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DirecTV Shelves Its Microsoft Media Plans
Today I learned through Ed Bott's blog that DirecTV has dropped its plans to release HD tuner hardware for Windows Media Center. Although the company just confirmed the news, there already were a few hints that DirecTV might lose its enthusiasm for a Media Center solution.
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Security Recession Proof?
There have been numerous stories lately about whether or not IT security is recession proof. The answer is: no
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Thoughts On The BlackBerry Storm
People actually waited in line for Research In Motion's first touch-screen BlackBerry, so you know this baby was highly anticipated. Since its release about three weeks ago, it's seen some mixed reviews. I decided to test and live with the Storm for a few weeks before publishing my thoughts. Read on to see if the Storm lives up to the expectations and hype.
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The Economics Of Cloud Computing
A special report on Cloud Computing in a recent Economist says that the current economic malaise should speed up the adoption of cloud computing since it will increase the pressure on companies to become more efficient.
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Should InformationWeek Follow Anyone On Twitter?
Over on FriendFeed, we're having a discussion of a mystery: Why does the Salon.com Twitter account have fewer than 300 followers? It's a popular Web magazine -- why don't more people follow it on Twitter?
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Salesforce CEO Benioff Sinks Teeth Into Non-SaaS Rivals
Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff took his company's cloud computing show to New York on Monday, complete with eardrum-splitting rock music and a wandering "No Software" mascot. Beyond the hype, here are the notable takeaways, gleaned from the company's two-and-a-half-hour presentation and a sit-down interview with Benioff.
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Google Doubles Street Views Coverage In The U.S.
Over at the Official Google Blog today, Google Street Views product manager Stephen Chau waxes poetic about Street Views' first year of existence. He also casually mentions that, starting today, the number of streets and areas covered by Street Views in the United States is doubling with the addition of a few key states.
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Fearing Layoffs, Most Workers Willing To Steal Data
Most workers frightened by the prospect of layoffs are considering stealing corporate data to use in negotiating for a new job, our excellent sister site Dark Reading reports. They're angry, scared, desperate, and unsophisticated -- but you, the CIO, are cool, calm, and confident because you're prepared for such an onslaught. Right? Well -- you are prepared, aren't you?
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The Chicago Tribune's Technology Is All Wet
I'd hoped to read about the Tribune Co.'s bankruptcy filing in today's newspaper, but it got delivered in the rain, so I threw the soaking wet mess into the garbage.
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Get Ready For Rogue Clouds
We're on the inevitable path toward "rogue cloud computing" inside companies. Is this a problem?
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The No Migration Strategy
I am a believer in getting old data off primary storage as fast as possible and previous entries have discussed manual migration, agent migration, and global file systems. One I have missed is the no migration strategy.
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Barry Diller Says Lay Off The Layoffs
Barry Diller's my new hero. The media mogul is hammering those companies which are downsizing, even though they don't really need to, simply because now's an easy time to board the layoff bandwagon. Hey, big companies, here's a news flash for you: You're not just laying off your workers, you're canning your potential customers, too.
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Novatel's MiFi = Wi-Fi Wherever You Want It
There is a reason why Wi-Fi is called a wireless local area network technology. Users must be within range of the hotspot (typically less than 300 feet) in order to use it. The MiFi from Novatel packages a 3G radio in a small, compact device that will create a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot (almost) anywhere you need one.
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LG Says It Has The World's First LTE Chip For Phones
LG announced a new cell phone chip that it is working on in its labs. It uses long term evolution (LTE), which is the next-generation wireless network technology chosen by U.S. carriers AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and others. Why is this special? Oh, just something about 60 megabit-per-second downloads over the air.
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Changes Ahead For E-Discovery Rules?
As IT and corporate counsel struggle with the financial, technical, and legal burdens of e-discovery, efforts are under way to lighten those burdens by modifying federal rules. But others say changes aren't necessary.
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Outsourcing Foes 'Less Than Thrilled' With Obama
Many opponents of offshoring, the process by which IT and other jobs are shipped to low-cost countries like India, have blamed the GOP for supposedly selling out the American worker. But there's evidence that Team Obama won't act much differently.
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Crimeware-As-A-Service Will Emerge In 2009
Many ISP's are selling your Web surfing habits to the highest bidder. That's a fact, but it's not a crime. Now take that concept to the next level. Envision vast databases full of credit card information, valid FTP site account data, and valid network credentials available for purchase by cybercriminals. A new and nefarious industry is born.
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When It Comes To Database Security: Enterprises Seem Confused
This October, research firm Enterprise Strategy Group surveyed 179 North American businesses with 1,000-plus employees about their database security efforts. The survey results (published today) reveal the bifurcated nature and the scary state of database security.
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Gilbane CMS Conference Highlights
It's usually no fun hearing about a party you weren't able to make it to, and while I wasn't at the Gilbane Content Management Conference in Boston last week, a number of highlights caught my attention.
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What Is The Next Step In The War On Spam?
We all know that spammers will do whatever it takes to find a way to send their advertisements and scams to potential victims. Spammers are circumventing methods services like Gmail, HotMail, and Yahoo use to stop automated spam to the point that even legitimate users of these services are unwitting victims of anti-spam.
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Google's Gmail Gets To-Do List
Just in time to help you with your holiday shopping, Google on Monday said that it had added a lightweight to-do list called Tasks to Gmail.
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Poznan Dispatch: Electronics Industry, Dirty Loopholes
Poznań politics are not for the un-caffeinated, as you can see from the live Web casts. That's unfortunate because some of the events may ultimately be jarring to environmentalists, industrialists and the man -- literally -- on the street.
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Sony Xperia X1 Delayed Until January
If you were hoping to have an American version of the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 for Christmas, you're out of luck. Reports are saying that the touch-screen smartphone with a full QWERTY keyboard will be delayed until January.
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RightScale's Cloud Outlook Is Upbeat Despite The Recession
It's unclear exactly how cloud computing will fare during the recession, but RightScale CEO Michael Crandell has a rosy outlook. That prognostication appears deserved for now: the cloud management startup just raised an additional $13 million.
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Wal-Mart IT Links Online, Retail Channels -- 80 Million Times
Wal-Mart's Web-based "Find-In-Store" capability has been used about 80 million times since last year as part of its drive to give customers more choice in how to buy and take delivery. Wal-Mart says customers want more information and more convenience, and are relying more on mobile devices. With Wal-Mart's sales rising in a lousy economy, there's a lesson here for all CIOs.
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Google: AdWords Now Targeting The Apple iPhone And HTC G1
If you're using Google's AdWords on your Web site, you're about to get a little bit more punch for your dollar. AdWord ads will now begin to appear on Web pages viewed by the Apple iPhone and HTC G1 Android phone.
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Open Source: Our Defense Against Lousy Preloaded Software
I spent a good part of the weekend helping a friend remote-repair her PC, which had suddenly gone berserk after she added memory to it. That's supposed to fix problems, not cause them -- in theory, anyway. By the time we were done, I'd gotten her sold on at least two open source programs as replacements for the ones causing this mess.
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Wal-Mart Employees: 'Yes, We're Going To Sell The iPhone.'
Bloomberg was able to get multiple employees at Wal-Mart stores in California to admit that the discount retailer will indeed be selling the Apple iPhone later this month. The employees did not, however, confirm the existence of a $99 iPhone.
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John Lennon, Then And Now
How did you get your news 28 years ago, on Dec. 8, 1980, the date John Lennon was gunned down in New York City?
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Android Developers Can Get A Completely Unlocked G1 Android Phone
If paying $180 to T-Mobile -- with a two-year contract -- for the HTC G1 isn't appealing, Android developers now have another option. For $399, they can order one that is SIM-unlocked and hardware-unlocked. In other words, it's totally open.
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Six Great Ways To Save On Holiday Shopping
Most people that know me know that I am a deal hunter. I've been this way for years and refuse to shop online without some sort of discount code. Here are six methods I use to save money when shopping online. I hope you find them beneficial during this holiday season.
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ISP-Funded Group Claims Google Isn't Paying Its Fair Share
Every once in a while, I come across some really bad conclusions based on some really bad research. The A First-Ever Research Study: Estimating Google's U.S. Consumer Internet Usage & Cost -- 2007-2010, from netCompetition.org, is one such document. Promising to be "straightforward, open, transparent, and replicable as possible" in its methods, the group's research findings are based on a mishmash of sources randomly aggregated to a wholly unfounded conclusion that Google isn't paying its fair share of bandwidth.
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Air Force Seeks (Non Lethal) City Stopper
While it won't destroy buildings, or directly kill people, it will shut down everything in its path with a power button.
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Debating The GM Bailout
My argument, 5 Things GM's Bailout Package Must Have, provoked strong reader reaction. Many people took issue with the idea of throwing any more money at Detroit. (Interestingly, as the prospect of bankruptcy looms larger, more folks are favoring a bridge loan; as is Congress, apparently.) Most of my readers weighed with interesting comments on the ideas I floated about tax credits, building roadside recharging stations, and getting the oil companies to pony up some R&D dollars. Read on for a selection from the reader e-mail bag.
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About Obama's Zune...
Forget the financial crisis, let's get to real issues. The general public wants to know what dog the Obama family will pick, and the tech world was amazed when the President-elect used a Microsoft Zune music player while he worked out. Can we believe this report? Yes, we can. However, it doesn't necessarily mean that Obama is giving up on his Apple products.
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PlateSpin Spins Up
Novell's Richard Whitehead is a pretty sharp guy. I tend to tout shiny new startups in the world of VMs; I'm a big fan of up-and-comers. I'm also an open source fan. Well. It is easy to forget that Novell is an open source shop and that PlateSpin offers pretty snazzy Swiss-army knife functionality for physical and virtual server management. Richard, bless his heart, won't let me forget.
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Master Virtualization And You Master The Cloud
Intel has its own definition of cloud computing and it makes no reference to virtualization. But virtualization, like it or not, lies at the heart of how things will get done in the cloud. I noticed this disparity in a review of an Intel presentation posted by the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum.
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Start-ups In A Down Economy
Six months ago I mentioned during my pre-employment interview with Rob Preston, InformationWeek's editor in chief, that I belonged to a Toastmasters club devoted to improving public speaking skills, and Rob told me a story about how in college his roommate got so carried away during a Toastmasters speech that he climbed on a desk for emphasis, only to hit his head on a ceiling fan and knock himself senseless.
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The Greatest Google Merchandise
Google on Thursday said it would supply Gmail stickers to anyone who sends in a self-addressed stamped envelope. It's an offer the company may come to regret.
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BlackBerry Storm Gets Updated
If you bought a BlackBerry Storm and were surprised at how crappy the software was, you may find some relief soon. Verizon Wireless is rolling out a much-needed firmware upgrade.
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Hewlett-Packard's Randy Mott: Greatest CIO Strategy Ever?
Yes, I'm making a loaded statement when I say Randy Mott has executed what might be the greatest CIO strategy ever. But consider what he's done for Hewlett-Packard in just three years: cut 85 data centers to six; 700 data marts to 55; 6,000 apps to 1,500; 19,000 IT pros to 10,000; tripled bandwidth at half the cost; cut IT spending from 4% of revenue to under 2%; and flipped the maintenance/innovation spending ratio from 80/20 to 30/70. My colleague Chris Murphy tells the remarkable story in "All In."
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Job Loss Inequality Shows Need As Obama Prepares To Launch Job Creation Plan
There's finally some inequality in the workplace that benefits women, but it's not all good news. It doesn't bode well for couples or families. And it may not last.
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Apple: 300 Million Apps Downloaded. Analysts: $99 iPhone Inevitable
iPhone users continue to download applications in massive quantities. The latest figures indicate that there have been 300 million applications downloaded since the Apps Store debuted in July. On top of that, analysts are speculating that Apple may re-introduce the 4-GB iPhone at a $99 price point.
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Microsoft, Open Source Schizoids
I take any of Microsoft's proclamations about open source with a Plymouth Rock-sized chunk of salt, especially when it comes in the form of a thinly disguised sales pitch. Such is the case with a recent PressPass release where it trumpets the benefits of a company dumping open source solutions in favor of going all-Microsoft.
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Should AT&T Consolidate To One Smartphone Platform?
At a Symbian event in San Francisco this week, an AT&T exec suggested that the company would like to support only one smartphone operating system for a number of reasons. Could AT&T survive with just one smartphone platform?
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Counting The Carbon Counters
Counting carbon is getting easier. Counting carbon counters is getting measurably more difficult. At least once a week an online tool to calculate one's carbon footprint, based on self-reported energy consumption, is introduced or improved.
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Macs Get Google Earth Browser Plug-In
If you're a Mac user and feeling jealous of Windows machine users' ability to use Google Earth directly in their browser, be jealous no more. Google has created a browser plug-in that will let you surf the Earth from Safari 3.1 and Firefox 3.0.
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Australia Gets The World's Second Android Phone
Fans of the Android platform should get excited about this one. Though it will only be available in Australia, the new Android-powered handset from Kogan is a hint at the possibilities ahead.
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Google Tweaks Its RSS Reader's Design
Yesterday, Google rolled out a redesign of its Reader product, which is, as the name implies, an RSS reader. The biggest changes include a new look, collapsible navigation, more visibility for your friends' shared items, and (blessedly!) the ability to hide unread counts.
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Drive IN Efficiency
In 2009, IT professionals will be asked yet again to do more with less. Much of this focus will be on "driving out cost" projects like primary storage reduction, archiving, and further server consolidation through virtualization. All good projects, but don't forget that you also will be asked to manage all this and your current environment with less staff, hence your need to drive IN efficiency.
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Advertising, The Science Fiction Version
Two California companies have invented technologies that quite literally create ads customized to the moments in which they're being viewed. This is a really cool and scary idea.
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FatWire Releases Content Server 7.5
FatWire this week announced the release of Content Server 7.5, the newest version of their flagship content management system.
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Secure USB Drive Comes To OS X
There are plenty of USB thumb drives with native encryption, such as IronKey, available -- if you're a PC user. Today, SanDisk announced its secure USB flash drive that supports OS X. It's about time.
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Net Neutrality Foe Charges Google With Bandwidth Freeloading
"Google uses 21 times more bandwidth than it pays for," charges Scott Cleland in a report issued under the aegis of Precursor, a telecom research and consulting firm. Cleland also runs NetCompetition.org, a group opposed to Net Neutrality legislation, which Google supports.
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Does MapReduce Signal The End Of The Relational Era?
Companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft that operate Internet-scale cloud services need to store and process massive data sets, such as search logs, Web content collected by crawlers, and click-streams collected from a variety of Web services. Each of these companies has developed its own strategy to support parallel computations over multiple petabyte data sets on large clusters of computers.
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'The CIO Needs To Reapply For His Job'
Your CEO tells you your reapplication process begins immediately with the question, "To capitalize on the current market, what changes should we make to our business model?" Can you give a riveting answer, or will the interview be rather brief? A punchy article from across the pond raises these and more great questions.
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Amazon Debuts Public Data Cloud
Amazon.com has introduced a new service in which it hosts large data sets -- economic, demographic, scientific, and medical data, for example -- that are open for anyone to access. It's an interesting proposal, but one that casts Amazon in the potentially difficult role of having to be an information gatekeeper.
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Actuate's Open Source Survey Says...
It's hard not to see open source usage surveys in the same light as any other assay of this kind: you can make the numbers say anything you like if you're careful (or not careful). I cracked open Actuate's Annual Open Source Survey for 2008 with this in mind, and while it has its limits it's still an interesting read.
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Leveraging External Talent To Energize Internal Processes
Companies today must constantly search for new ways to co-create experiences with individual customers. A recent Wall Street Journal article about Google and Procter & Gamble swapping workers to gain fresh perspectives brings out the essence of how the companies' "invisible dominant logic" can hinder such innovative efforts.
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Recycle This Blog
In what appears to be a truly holistic recycling effort, news put forth by the University of Michigan on its green computing efforts last June has been finding new life on news feeds in early December. Not one to shirk my recycling duties, I offer now a roundup of other relevant nonbreaking news. And for what it's worth, not only are they are all related to the U-M story, but I probably would have missed them if not for the Detroit Free Press rehash of the Wolver-green story.
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With Pownce Gone - Who's Next To Be Acquired?
Earlier this week we learned that short messaging service Pownce was closing shop. I shared some of the reasons I believe it closed. For a long time, Pownce was considered the second most popular short messaging service behind Twitter. With the Pownce closure, I started to wonder...who's next to be acquired?
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Why Isn't 'Used' The 'New' New?
eBay is the uber-auction site that should be connecting today's penny-punching consumers, only its traffic is down significantly. What's wrong?
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Apple Yanks Controversial Support Page
Apparently, Apple never intended to recommend individual users install multiple antivirus applications to protect the venerable operating system.
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iPhone Roundup: Apps Store's Top Tens, Easy Wi-Fi App, Amazon App
A number of interesting iPhone-related tidbits have surfaced in the last 24 hours. First, Apple gave us a list of the most downloaded apps in the Apps Store. Second, a company made an app that lets iPhone users bypass the clunky AT&T Wi-Fi service sign-in. Last, Amazon rolled out an application that lets you take a picture of any product and be taken to that product's Web site.
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5 Things GM's Bailout Package Must Have
Last month, I argued in favor of the GM bailout package, because I believe Americans should make things -- servers, cars -- that are more technologically complex than cheeseburgers. Now, with Congress apparently poised to move on some kind of financial rescue plan, it's time to decide how to rapidly reshape Detroit's Big 3 to make hybrid, electric, and fuel-cell vehicles. Here's my five-point plan.
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A Peek At Open Source In 10 Years
The folks at the Open World Forum are looking ahead to the year 2020 to see what the world of FLOSS (free, "libre" and open source software) holds. The future they see is rosy, but requires hard work to reach.
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French RIAA Vs. SourceForge, Take Two
Last month the French RIAA, the SPPF, declared that it was bringing suit against SourceForge for aiding and abetting peer-to-peer piracy. It sounded ludicrous, and now there's better evidence to show it is indeed every bit as stupid as it sounded.
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Politicker.com Impeaches Amazon Web Services
Political Web site Politicker.com has ditched Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud service in favor of Voxel dot Net's managed Web hosting service. In an unusually frank assessment, Politicker says scalability, clustering, stability, and cost issues drove it away from EC2.
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Report: Google Taking Economic Climate Seriously, Cutting Back On Perks
Google has long been known to spare no expense when it comes to perks for employees. Looks like the slowdown in ad revenue is having an impact on Google, and the company is looking for ways to trim costs. In addition to staff reductions, Google also is cutting back on Googlers' 20% time on pet projects and has reduced the availability of its free cafeterias.
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Yahoo Among Stocks Erasing Record Losses From Monday
Yahoo performed better than the Nasdaq Composite and the Dow Jones industrial average on Tuesday, after word spread that former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller was interested in buying the company.
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T-Mobile's G1 Can't Turn Off Data Roaming, Should Be Left In The U.S.
A user of the HTC G1 Android phone was unhappy to receive a cell phone bill that included $102.85 in data roaming fees -- even though he had turned data roaming off. In the G1's case, off doesn't really mean off.
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DotNetNuke Announces New Funding, Readies Version 5.0
The DotNetNuke team has a few things to celebrate. It recently closed on a round of financing, won a pair of awards in Packt Publishing's Open Source CMS Awards, and is getting ready for the release of DotNetNuke 5.0.
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Quick Thinking CEO, Employees Thwart Theft
An employee at Vancouver-based C-W Agencies had requested three backup tapes, other employees at the firm asserted. Problem is: one disappeared.
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Rwanda's Internet Revolution (Video)
Past an incomprehensible genocide and a still-agrarian economy lies a country that's pinning its last gasp of hope on the Internet to lift itself out of poverty, prevent future violence, and become the economic hub of sub-Saharan Africa. Some of TechWeb's TV crew traveled into the heart of Rwanda, crouched in the jungle amid a sea of silverback gorillas, danced on the border of the notoriously dangerous Democratic Republic of Congo, and came back with a remarkable, mesmerizing story of hope.
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Microsoft Cashback, Blackest Friday Edition
Black Friday is supposed to get its name from the profit-friendly color it brings to merchant balance sheets. Microsoft's Live Search Cashback program came up with an embarrassingly different definition for the term. When a shopping search engine is unavailable for several hours on the biggest shopping day of the year, that's a Black Friday indeed.
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Don't Hold The Phone, And Other Recycling Incentives
My BlackBerry went for a swim the other day. I'm too embarrassed to tell you where, save to say that I find myself multitasking these days in the oddest places. I will say that when it sank beneath the surface, its lights flickered like those of the doomed Titanic. That meant, aside from having an intense desire to boil my hand, I had to get a new BlackBerry and, yes, recycle the old one.
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Video: Hands On With The Nokia N97
InformationWeek had the chance to spend some time with the new Nokia N97. Here's a complete rundown of the hardware and user interface of Nokia's darling little multimedia computer.
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IBM Patents System For Splitting The Check
The waiter deposits a $200 check and an uncomfortable silence envelops the table. Glances are exchanged and eyebrows are raised. Who ordered the expensive wine? Who only had a soda and sandwich? Who pays for what? Enter IBM.
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Google Gives Windows Users A Gmail Gadget For The Desktop
If you're a user of the Google Desktop product on the Windows platform, Google has good news for you. It's finally added a Gmail gadget for the Desktop sidebar. Now you can see incoming e-mail without opening up Gmail in your browser.
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Guy Kawasaki On 'The Art Of Laying People Off'
In which the outspoken venture capitalist and author, as always, speaks bluntly: "Take responsibility. ... Cut deep and cut once. ... Don't ask for pity." Here's Kawasaki on sharing the pain: "Take a smaller office. Turn in the company car. ... Give your 30-inch flat-panel display to a programmer who could use it to debug faster." His 12 tips don't make for much happy talk but for business leaders in these troubled times they do, unfortunately, make sense.
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Linux's New Digs: The iPhone
So now the latest iteration of the iPhone hasn't just been "jailbroken," it's snagged a visa to another country entirely. A project named OpeniBoot lets you boot Linux on the iPhone -- admittedly with little more than a command line, but for Linux that's more than enough to begin with.
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A Google Cloud In Your Data Center
Google's App Engine lets you build, deploy, and run Web applications on Google's infrastructure. But what if you wanted to create a Google App Engine experience in your own data center? Work is under way to make that possible.
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Nokia Unveils The N97, Its Real iPhone Competitor
Today in Barcelona, Nokia announced its flagship multimedia phone for 2009, the N97. The N97 sports a 3.5-inch touch screen and a full QWERTY keyboard for messaging. Other specs include 3G, Wi-Fi, 5-megapixel camera, GPS, and a whole lot more.
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Significant Attack Hits DoD Computers
Most attacks against Department of Defense systems that we hear about amount to minor attacks on unclassified systems. And while the DoD's network is hammered on 24/7, most of those probes don't get anywhere. Apparently, this attack did.
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Can You Track The 'Revenue Of IT'?
Does your company capture the full value of what IT delivers, or are the conversations only about how much IT costs? (Which then usually comes down to "too much.")
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CIO Memo To Staff: Should Customers Really Rank Last?
In ugly times like these, what message does a CIO send to the business technology team about 2009? The National Bureau of Economic Research just declared that the United States entered a recession a year ago, consumer spending has tanked, the auto industry is floundering, and the financial industry is still trying to find its bottom (so to speak). If you're looking for inspiration, Gartner VP Michael Maoz has just posted a hypothetical "CIO to Staff" memo that's worth reading.
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'The Simpsons' Takes On Apple
When I came in this morning, Twitter was buzzing over an Apple parody that ran on The Simpsons last night. Homer, Marge, and the kids visit the Mapple Store at the mall and admire the MyPods and MyPhones. The segment includes a parody-in-a-parody of the famous 1984 Apple "Big Brother" commercial, featuring Comic Book Guy instead of an athletic woman with Eurythmics hair. Watch the embedded video below, until YouTube takes it down.
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Obama's Innovation Panel Creates Opportunity, Pride For Tech Industry
President-elect Barack Obama has added an advisory group for technology and innovation to his transition team. The newly formed Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform Policy Working Group will draft an "innovation agenda."
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Free-As-In-Beer Tools For Chrome And Firefox
"Free as in beer", meaning, of course, free to use, but not open source. In this case, it's a couple of tools which are handy as adjuncts to both Firefox and Chrome.
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Open Source: Broken Model Or Breaking The Mold?
Much of the analysis of open source business models seems schizoid: it's either the greatest thing since sliced bread or the worst thing since ... you get the idea. The truth is, of course, somewhere in the middle, but in what form?
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Get Ready For Some Big News From Nokia
On Tuesday, Nokia kicks off its own Nokia World show in Barcelona, Spain. According to what I've been told by Nokia staffers, Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo will be dropping a huge bomb during his keynote address. The device is so secret that most Nokia employees haven't seen it yet.
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The Primary Storage Temptation
As IT staffs get stretched even thinner, a challenge is arising in what to do with primary storage. There is still the need for more and more capacity, there are limited dollars to buy more of it, and there are limited resources to properly manage it.
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Alcatel-Lucent's Big Plans
Alcatel-Lucent recently announced a sweeping set of enhancements across many of its switch and unified communications product lines. ALU, better known in the service provider arena, wants to send the message that it can compete with the likes of Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, and 3Com as a total solution provider for voice and data services rather than a point product vendor. Is a single source necessary or the best option?
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Poznan Punch: What You See Is What You'll Get
So, what do we make of this week's climate summit in Poznań, Poland? That may well depend on what emotional baggage we bring on our trip.
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Google Calendar Now Supports Apple's iCal
Google recently added support for Apple's native calendaring program. With a new tool, users can set it up so that Google Calendar and Apple's iCal can share information.
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First Firmware Update For The BlackBerry Storm Blows Into Town
If you've read any reviews of the BlackBerry Storm, you no doubt have heard that the poor thing is a bit buggy. Heck, even The New York Times' David Pogue harshed on it. The initial batch of Storm's are running firmware version 4.7.0.65. Over the weekend, firmware version 4.7.0.75 became available, and with it a bunch of fixes.
Continue reading "First Firmware Update For The BlackBerry Storm Blows Into Town..."
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