Despite Cooling Economy, No MS Hiring Freeze

So far, Microsoft hasn't been clobbered by the Wall Street fiasco, meltdown, mess, debacle, scandal or disgrace. In fact, Microsoft went on the record denying that it was freezing its hiring. As many companies are laying off thousands, not freezing hiring sounds pretty dang good.

Is this economy affecting your shop, and if so, how? Stories of gloom and perseverance welcome at [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on October 07, 20080 comments

Mailbag: .NET vs. Java, More Thoughts on Scareware

I am not a developer, but from a system admin point of view, I do not care for Java. With .NET, you have 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.0 and soon 4.0. With Java, you have 10 or 12 JRE releases per 1.6.xx release. This becomes very cumbersome because most apps are tested against a certain Java release so each time that changes you have to deploy the new JRE (I called it the 'JRE chase'). I had this issue with a company that developed health care software. As a company, they did not seem to care much.

With .NET, you only have a handful of releases and they can be easily deployed with WSUS.
-David

Readers chime in with more of their thoughts on scareware, and their suggestions for fighting it:

I hate scareware! Had a machine last year with this problem. A user was clicking on the supposed 'problem' messages.

I think Centurion or another type of freezing software that puts the computer back to a clean state upon restart is one of the best ways to deal with it in a large deployment. Of course, keeping users from having install rights and user education are effective tools, as well.
-Jason

Have PCs that you maintain for friends or family? You would do them a huge favor if you set up multiple accounts in Windows, with the accounts that access the Internet having limited privileges. For adults, provide them with clear instructions on the only times they can log in to an administrative account to install well-known software.

My two children would be tempted to do the same thing many other computer novices do when these types of pop-ups occur, or they just want to add that required software to run games on their browser. Secure it and then lock down all the possibilities to find other ways to install executables. We haven't had a single virus for years on a family computer that's actively used by four different accounts.
-Joe

These stories are all reasons why people should NOT be surfing the Web using an account with administrator privileges! This means setting up the PC from the very beginning with an administrator's account and a limited-user account, and doing all of your normal work with that limited-user account.

Of course, how many people not in the IT field would know about this? Should companies that sell computers do a better job of educating the general public about this?
-Steve

And Doug's daughter chimes in with her advice:

How do I prevent the scareware pop-ups (and all pop-ups)? I got a Mac, and have maybe had one single pop-up since.
-Lauren

What do you think? Leave a comment below or send an e-mail to [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on October 07, 20080 comments

Red-Hot HPC

HPC has long been the purview of designers, engineers, 3-D renderers and data miners. These high-performance boxes cluster massive arrays of processors, often x86 (and GPUs for the graphics-inclined), and aim it all at a small set of specialized applications. It's very cool, but unfortunately a bit of a niche.

And many of these systems -- in essence, commodity supercomputers -- have been running Linux. It's free and nice and scalable across clusters, multicores and multiprocessors. Windows Server is also showing some spunk in this market, and the availability of either Linux or Windows means you may be able to apply this muscle soon to more common data-processing tasks.

Red Hat doesn't want to miss this opportunity and has a new bundle -- a software stack, if you will -- that includes Linux itself along with clustering tools and a job scheduler. With so much great commodity hardware, this should form the basis of expensive and utterly ripping HPC systems.

Can you see a use for this style of HPC/supercomputer? Super-smart answers accepted at [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on October 07, 20080 comments

Killer Mac

What ever happened to our CRTs giving us all cancer with their radioactive effulgence? Do you fear your computer, your cell phone or the high tension lines that power them? Fears and comforting thoughts both welcome at [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on October 06, 20080 comments

Amazon Seeds Windows Cloud

Many of Amazon's cloud services have apparently been Linux-based. But Linux isn't enough for many customers who want to run Windows Server and SQL Server remotely. Amazon is more than happy to oblige, and is now beta testing these two platforms.

Microsoft itself is widely expected to announce a cloud of its own later this month. Will clouds change the role of IT? And what services would you most want up there? Wise answers welcome, as always, at [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on October 06, 20080 comments

LeftHanded Complement

HP is strengthening its virtual storage hand by shelling out $360 million to buy LeftHand Networks, an up-and-coming maker of iSCSI storage.

I think storage is the next frontier in virtualization, but the industry has to work on overall definitions, standards and tools that are easier to install and manage. What is the reality of virtual storage? Shoot your thoughts and experiences off to [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on October 06, 20080 comments

Mailbag: Cautionary Scareware Tales

We're a non-profit providing low-cost computers to low-income disabled and low-income seniors. The majority of our clientele are new to computers, and when presented with a big warning in large letters, they will click "Fix it!" This is a real problem, since our people have no clue as to how to remove the infection (and I've done it and it isn't easy or quick). What a pain!
-Paul

I just finished a full factory restore on a friend's laptop because he clicked on a pop-up for Antivirus 2008. This "free" virus checker completely trashed his machine. Luckily, I was able to save most of his documents prior to the machine becoming completely unusable.
-Ron

I am an IT pro, have been for 30 years. There is a lot to be said for the old dumb terminals that did not have Internet! Since Aug. 1, we have had 15-plus machines get the Antivirus 2008 or some variant thereof at work, and at least that many employees' personal home machines, which has earned me some additional pocket money.

But my own personal machines at home (two) also got it -- the first thanks to one of my daughters, and the second I have to take the blame for. And before I found a great tool for removal, I spent days trying to clean them up. In fact, for the one my daughter did, I accidentally deleted some files in the Windows folder that from that point prevented me from logging back into the machine, period. I had to change hard drives and make the original C drive D to be able to back up the 75GB of stuff she had on it. Another week of restoring and re-installing, and she was back up. Lawsuit is not punishment enough -- theses companies should be tarred and feathered!
-Harry

One of our office machines was playing music from the Internet through Media Player and a window popped up declaring, "You have been infected with horrible Trojans, you need to download this now." Thankfully, I was there and they asked me what was going on. I found out that this was that bogus Antivirus 2009 that has been showing up in various places. What really surprised me was that this site not only showed up as an advertisement on the site Media Player was pointed to, but was a sponsored site on Google and Yahoo and probably other search engines. I am truly amazed that these search sites don't screen their advertisers better than this. Apparently, these scammers are willing to pay to appear on search engines because we are gullible and will fall into their trap.

The other thing that surprised me was that even while I was telling the user that this was bogus, they kept saying, "It looks so official, so genuine." I pointed out that they would hardly make it look fake if they really want to fool people, and they still kept saying, "It looks so real." Yes, it does.
-Anonymous

I'm there right now with a PC hit by scareware. Our HR manager brought in his home laptop and he swears he only visited the GA Bulldog Web site. The laptop has been taken over by one of those "Your PC is infected" scams. It's infected, all right! I'm at the point now where the only recourse is to erase the hard drive. I hope there will be teeth in whatever is done to go after these companies!
-Buz

XP anti-spam, or something similar, got onto my daughter's computer. I used Symantec's eradication instructions, but it took days of effort, and I learned more about registry than I wanted to know.
-Bill

I had a situation recently where my son got attacted by one of these programs. I did eventually fix it, but it took three days, a lot of investigation and a copy of bootable Linux to get to the root of the problem. It was almost as bad as a rootkit to get rid of. Normally, I would probably have just reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled, but I was bound and determined that some punk was not going to get the best of me. Since then, I have heard of a number of other people infected with this crap, and I just wish I would have documented what I had to do to fix it and post the fix on the Web. Maybe next time.
-Rusty

One of our employees approached me and said his home computer had gotten some type of virus and had become unusable. Being the compassionate IT manager that I am, I told him to bring it in. When I turned it on and booted it up, I could not do anything but stare in disbelief, and then laugh. Basically, his background wallpaper was red with a virus symbol and the words "You have a virus" or something to that effect. A pop-up box with a bogus scan started running and messages started popping up everywhere saying all types of virus and spyware were detected. I watched amused as Norton AntiVirus helplessly tried to get things under controll, but it was way out of its league and was probably making things worse. I could not click or open anything except a dialog box that popped up saying that I needed to buy the full version of Vista Antivirus 2008 to fix the problem.

Apparently, while he was surfing the Web he came upon a site that popped up a dialog box that would "scan his computer for free" for viruses and spyware. My solution for him? Boot from the XP CD, stay away from questionable Web sites and do not click on links that promise to clean your PC. Well, you can guess...the rest is history.
-Asif

I am a division chief with a south Chicago suburb fire department and also the IT manager for the same municipality. I have had about 30 PCs that have been infected by these seemingly legitimate pop-ups. I advise my users to just pull the power plug when one appears, no matter what they're doing. For the unfortunate ones that didn't, or just clicked the "X" in the top-right corner, they paid the ultimate data processing price. Their hard drives went to alphabet heaven. A few were recovered by purchasing other anti-virus software and these actually did clean up the mess. Most weren't so lucky. The impact of this is that a lot of these firefighters have had to use their personal PCs for training. Hours and hours of PowerPoint presentations, movies and lessons that firefighters and paramedics use went up in smoke.

The problem with this latest round of "You're infected" pop-ups is that they have the look and feel of a real Microsoft window. When a virus takes on the look and feel of an operating system, the average user is not going to have the tools to decide between "Oh, this one is real" and "Uh-oh...yank the plug." Microsoft and the DAs of the states -- if not at the federal and international level -- should hunt these authors down and prosecute them fully with felony charges.
-Tom

Got a comment of your own you'd like to share? Let us know! Leave a comment below or send an e-mail to [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on October 06, 20080 comments

Mailbag: Much Ado About the Cloud, .NET vs. Java, More

Cloud, shmoud. Yes, the cloud is way overhyped. I'm already tired of hearing about it. Isn't this just another name for client/server computing? Ho-hum. Been there, way past that.

Oh, and the day I would trust our company's data and/or applications to the cloud is the day the entire Internet decides to take a dump and I would be shown the door. No thanks.
-Phil

I think that anyone dismissing cloud computing as hype doesn't know what's going on around them. We're going through another swing toward "mainframe" computing, but this time instead of using thin clients to access user sessions on beefier servers, individual servers are being virtualized on large servers, and the new thin client is the browser.

I would recommend that people look into hosted cloud offerings such as Mosso.com, Amazon's EC2 and others to get an idea of what utility cloud computing really is. You pay for what you use, and your environment scales dynamically to meet your usage needs. You no longer need to spec out individual pieces of hardware for hosting certain applications. You just put your applications online and go. You pay for the disk space, bandwidth and CPU time that you use. Cloud computing is service on-demand. Many SaaS providers are hosting on these types of platforms to dynamically scale their application as they add subscribers. The mainframe is getting much smarter. We apologize if it has a catchy name.
-Jeremy

A recent survey suggests that .NET is making gains against Java. Readers share where they stand:

A lot depends on what you are doing and what you need to do. We use both .NET and Java; some of the tools we use are .NET-centric and some are Jave-centric. The tools perform very well and play nicely with each other. Here's my take, though: If Microsoft doesn't start lowering the prices, I think it's going to end up pricing itself out of the market. Yes, its tools are well-polished, but it's not like the average programmer can pick up a copy and play with it. You used to be able to do that with VB and still afford lunch, but that day has disappeared. Plus, the toolset has gotten a lot more complicated and more pricey. I can download any number of IDEs for Java development and pick the one that suits me. With .NET, I'm pretty much limited to MS -- especially if what I'm doing is mission-critical.

I used to have an MSDN subscription, but I honestly can't justify the cost to my boss. In fact, I'd rather have them spend the money and give me a standalone SAP system, which is another thing I develop for. I don't even need to worry about .NET vs. Java in that environment; I just use what they provide and it all plays nicely together. So if you're developing the latest tool for Symantec, then yeah, .NET and MSDN is the way to go. But if it doesn't matter what builds your app, I think MS has a LONG way to go to justify the cost.
-Bruce

As far as .NET vs. Java, we are a custom software dev shop in Austin, Texas that USED to do both Java and .NET -- but we have not had a single customer requesting Java in more than three years! Every project where the customer's RFP specifies the base technology, it has almost always been .NET (and occasionally PHP on Web projects). And where they have not specified, I cannot remember a single project that ended up being a Java project. The only Java developers I still know are some guys who are evolving a five-year-old application for Pitney Bowes, and even they are starting to move to .NET for future versions. As for us, we are now pretty much exclusively a C#/.NET house.
-Shaune

A few more of you chimed in on VMware and its plan to create a datacenter OS:

VMware's plans for the datacenter OS are great ideas if it can make them work. This would allow us to use some of our older hardware for the processing power that otherwise have gone to the scrap heap. It could also lead to faster results and provide a better user experience. In terms of moving this eventually to the cloud, I believe there are going to be many reservations and there will have to be some high-level SLAs to justify this move.
-Andy

Not so long ago, I worked for a litigation support company with a close relationship with EMC, a relationship that was doomed because EMC eventually decided to be a competitor and the litigation support company was acquired by a search engine vendor without a single clue. During the EMC days, however, we had VMware forced down our throats at every opportunity, first on our development machines and later with the enterprise edition forced into our datacenter. I hated it on the development machines, both because of its effect on peformance and because we repeatedly lost significant amounts of development due to virtual machine issues. (I eventually refused to continue using VMware on development machines, switching fully to Virtual PC for improved performance and greater stability.) Use of enterprise editions of VMware in the datacenter proved nearly catastophic. The servers on which it was deployed suffered severe performance degradation and increasingly erratic behavior. It was yanked from all production servers shortly thereafter.

In my opinion, VMWare enjoyed success in the virtualization market as an early, major player with few competitors, a level of success that's quickly fading, in part because it lacks the technical and business expertise to effectively compete with later-arriving players and because virtualization is a technology best embedded in the core operating system. I fully expect Microsoft to reduce VMware to "also-ran" status in the virtualization market -- and I look forward to it doing so.
-John

Philip shares his thoughts on exactly what Microsoft's High Performance Computing (HPC) Sever is capable of doing:

The whole HPC issue is a little muddied since the cores of current desktop and server machiens are plenty busy due to them being dispatched by the large number of concurrent threads running on the typical machine. Sorry to disagree with you -- and also Microsoft -- on this issue. Microsoft's HPC push is designed to deal with the next generation of processors that will have MANY more cores (dozens, hundreds), and there may not be enough work via a typical multithreaded application and operating system to keep the cores busy

In essence, the HPC push is an educational and technical push to get developers to break up their applications into smaller subunits of execution (which is not possible or practical with current compiler and OS technology). HPC is also a necessary evolution of Microsoft's .NET technology to provide it with better scalability and also some unique distinctions so that it is a more attractive platform for high-end/high-performance applications.
-Philip

And Fred thinks there's more to Microsoft's recent $40 billion stock buyback than meets the eye

I wonder whether this is Microsoft buying back assorted shares of lots of small investors on the open market...or Bill and Steve cashing in by having Microsoft buy back some (or all?) of THEIR shares before the market implodes on them.
-Fred

We want to know what you think! Leave a comment below or send an e-mail to [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on October 02, 20080 comments

Unified Communication Still More Hype than Reality

The emergence of VoIP should've made all this much, much easier, but when it comes to UC, we aren't really any closer than we were 12 years ago.

Some of you have figured all of this out and have effective UC strategies. You're a minority, and I'm envious. Most of us still have unintegrated pockets of contacts, messages and data -- work phones, home phones, home office phones, cell phones, corporate e-mail and private e-mail. How do you make all this work together? Solutions welcome at [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on October 02, 20080 comments

Chuck Going Back in Space

Simonyi either liked space so much, or has so much cash to burn that he's heading back up. Good luck, Chuck!

Posted by Doug Barney on October 02, 20080 comments

Scaring Scareware

Not everyone is so smart. Plenty click on the pop-ups and buy the unnecessary -- and often bogus -- security software offered. I had a whole machine destroyed this way, and I never even clicked the link! I swear!

Microsoft is working with the state of Washington to sue companies that exploit Windows to deliver these misleading pop-ups. I hope Microsoft and the state attorneys kick some major pop-up butt.

Have you or anyone you know been victimized by this garbage? Horror stories welcome at [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on October 02, 20080 comments

.NET on the Rise

That may be the reason .NET is on the rise, taking a few chunks out of Java's market share. According to a new report by Evans Data, 60 percent of developers will invest more in .NET. Developers are a finicky lot, so Microsoft is either doing something very right or the Java camp is doing something very wrong.

Where do you stand -- behind Java or Microsoft? Tell me what you think at [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on October 01, 20080 comments