Steve Jobs spent the holiday season prepping his Macworld speech and
fighting
off charges that he and the Apple board of directors played it fast and
loose with stock options. Jobs ducked the charges (it was, after all, an Apple
investigation, sorta like Al Franken looking into Hillary Clinton's campaign
finances), and I'm glad.
Even if he was found guilty, I'd pull a Gerry Ford and pardon the poor guy.
Let's face it: Steve Jobs is good for America, and even better for Microsoft.
When Jobs was forced out of Apple by John Scully, the company lost its vision
and stalled.
When the prodigal son returned, Apple was reborn. My only gripe is that Jobs
killed off the Mac clones (imagine if Dell, HP, IBM and Gateway all made Macs).
I don't care if Steve Jobs stole my kid's lunch money -- we still need a strong
Apple to balance the scales and keep Gates & Crew on its toes!
Posted by Doug Barney on January 10, 20070 comments
Hard drives are great; they're cheap and getting bigger every year. Flash drives
are cool, too: cheap, convenient and fast. So, what if we could have the best
of both worlds? That's exactly what Toshiba, Seagate, Hitachi and others are
working on. The vendors are
grafting
a flash front end onto a hard drive -- all to make Vista PCs and laptops
that much faster.
Posted by Doug Barney on January 09, 20070 comments
There's a
new
test version of Longhorn, which has been in beta for about three-fourths
of a year. This is still a pretty exclusive test, so if you're not yet part
of the program, start working your contacts now.
Posted by Doug Barney on January 09, 20070 comments
Nearly 17 years ago, Bill Gates first spoke of information at your fingertips.
(
Here's
a great review of that speech.)
The idea is that one should be able to get information whenever and wherever
they need it. Now that a small fraction of the world has realized that dream,
Gates has moved on to his next goal -- connecting everything to everything.
At his annual keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show, Gates restated the
vision and bragged about the progress he and his partners have made. Gates also
showed
off a few new tricks, including a new server system so all our devices can
have a central place for backup, storage of photos and such, and -- through
a Windows Live Internet address -- the ability to get to this content from anywhere.
Hey, isn't that what servers were defined for in the first place?
Posted by Doug Barney on January 09, 20072 comments
Virtual PC 2007, set to ship this quarter, is
now
a release candidate, which means it is in the very final stages of testing.
The new rev supports hardware virtualization tweaks built into the latest Intel
and AMD high-end chips.
For the true virtualization aficionados, the software can run up to 32 virtual
machines at the same time. I guess it's time for a few more megs of RAM, eh
what?
Posted by Doug Barney on January 09, 20070 comments
Vista for consumers will ship at the end of this month, and not coincidently
a
new rev of Microsoft's OneCare anti-virus software will be ready at
precisely the same time. For customers, having more security options -- especially
ones that tie tightly into Vista -- is a good thing.
But I still don't know how I feel about how Microsoft got into this
market. First, it built an OS that needed anti-virus, then watched as Symantec
and others made hundreds of millions fixing Windows' problems. Now that
Redmond knows precisely how it's done, the company is going full-throttle.
Is this fair to all the anti-virus pioneers? Our
latest cover story takes a tough but fair look at this important issue.
Posted by Doug Barney on January 08, 20070 comments
I don't know anyone that doesn't use PDFs nearly every day -- I
couldn't live without them. Hackers have taken notice and
recently
attacked a flaw in the PDF format -- crafting worms, ways to steal cookies
and methods to take over remote machines. The fix for IE is to upgrade, while
Firefox users are advised to turn off Acrobat support.
Posted by Doug Barney on January 08, 20070 comments
Cisco owns the networking space as completely as Microsoft owns the desktop.
Microsoft gained its control by relentlessly writing code and competing with
a fierceness that would make George Steinbrenner proud.
Cisco has built its share of great products, but much of its growth is from
an unrivaled string of acquisitions (it is a master at integrating companies).
But eventually the desktop and network worlds will collide and Microsoft and
Cisco will really be put to the test.
Last week Cisco edged closer to Microsoft territory with the $830
million purchase of IronPort, a maker of anti-virus and anti-spam tools.
On the flip side, Microsoft violated Cisco territory through its unified communications
strategy, where Microsoft partnered with Nortel, rather than Cisco. So far,
the gloves are on, but I can see this turning bare-knuckle real fast!
Posted by Doug Barney on January 08, 20070 comments
Redmond magazine columnist Greg Shields got this tip from faithful reader
Travis: "We've been having problems with our ACT conference bridge that've
started with the installation of Vista/Office 2007. When Outlook 2007 receives
a new message, the 'new message' sound apparently is the exact same sound as
some of the touchtone sounds on the phone. For us, it causes the conference
bridge to temporarily pause the conference and start reading off the long list
of commands. This has happened multiple times. We've also seen problems where
the Windows startup sound causes the conference bridge to completely shut down.
There must be some similarity between the new Vista/Office sounds and the tones
a telephone uses!"
Posted by Doug Barney on January 03, 20070 comments
Hate your boss, don't make enough scratch to keep your Yugo running (that's
a lot of scratch) or just want a new batch of potential office dates? Well,
bucko, now could be a good time.
A
survey of CIOs from Consultancy Robert Half Technology shows that 16 percent
plan on increasing hiring. Time to get those resumes and references in order,
mate!
And what skill is in most demand? Managing Windows!
Posted by Doug Barney on January 03, 20070 comments
Every time Microsoft talked about putting its operating systems in cars or at
the center of our home entertainment systems, I'd scoff, knowing the only thing
that crashed more than Windows was Nascar's Bodine brothers (two points if you
know their first names!).
Now Redmond is prepping a
deal to put Windows in new Ford cars, letting drivers check e-mail (please
pull over to do this!), navigate or Web surf.
Despite my earlier skepticism, I'm ready to give Microsoft the benefit of the
doubt (though I still don't want Windows operating my brakes!).
Posted by Doug Barney on January 03, 20070 comments
I respect what open source zealots such as the Free Software Foundation have
done. But
its
new Web site badvista.org is a cheap shot, and an easy one at that.
One mission of the site is to compel the press to tell users to look at open
source alternatives to Vista, not just promote the Mac.
I'd love to do that, but on the client, the open source movement has a lot
of work to do. These distros just aren't ready for the mass market, and I've
long believed that vendors such as Novell and RedHat aren't
even trying.
Posted by Doug Barney on January 03, 20070 comments