News that
20
percent of IT folk will move to Vista
tells me one thing: Folks can't run
away from XP's security holes fast enough! Twenty percent might not sound like
a lot, but for IT to migrate this number of systems is pretty dramatic. This
is a boon for hardware makers, especially high-end video board outfits, whose
gear is needed for Vista to run right.
Posted by Doug Barney on November 16, 20060 comments
What do you do if your processor monopoly is being steadily eroded by AMD? Why,
get into software, of course!
To do so, Intel
is pulling out every Web 2.0 buzzword in the book, including Web 2.0 itself,
wikis, open source, RSS and blogs.
But Intel didn't turn hardware hacks into software jocks. Instead, it gathered
tools from various software vendors to build a suite for small and medium-sized
companies.
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Posted by Doug Barney on November 15, 20060 comments
The Blue Screen of Death is never a pretty sight, though my XP box usually just
hangs and dies without ever turning blue (reminds me how when the old Commodore
Amiga crashed, you'd get a blinking orange "Guru Meditation Error"
-- and with the Amiga you got these a lot!).
If you've managed to get your machine totally stabilized (tell us all how you
did that by writing me at [email protected])
and miss the Blue Screen, have I got a tool for you!
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Posted by Doug Barney on November 15, 20060 comments
I thought after all those dinners with Bono and all those hours spent doing good
that we'd have a new, nicer, softer Bill Gates.
We don't. Gates has as much spunk and moxie as ever, as he showed his Bill-ish
bluster when defending
Vista in Europe. Don't forget, it was the Europeans who stalked Vista every
step of the way, pushing for this feature to be yanked, that item to be pulled
and APIs to be opened wider than Bill O'Reilly's mouth. According to Gates,
the European authorities wanted to "castrate" Windows.
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Posted by Doug Barney on November 15, 20060 comments
So you've just finished your software masterpiece, a beautiful pile of code
that could be the next VisiCalc. So what's stopping all the creeps on the Internet
from exposing the source code and giving it to every code monkey from Boston
to Bismark?
Stealing your intellectual property is one thing. Even worse, hackers can use
the source to attack your product!
If you develop with Visual Studio, more help is in the way. There is an
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Posted by Doug Barney on November 14, 20060 comments
CompUSA will start
selling
Vista by the end of this month
to small business customers. The deal is
aimed at being fair to small shops, as corporate customers with Enterprise Agreements
can pick up Vista this month, as well.
But this all seems so backward. Businesses are the last to move to new versions
of Windows, usually waiting until at least SP1.
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Posted by Doug Barney on November 14, 20060 comments
Plus, Jave goes open source, Visual Studio to come with obfuscation tools and
more.
Today is a special day. My daughter Lauren turned 18 (she can now buy lottery
tickets and cigarettes, and apparently doesn't have to listen to her father,
or so she tells me).
It's
also patch Tuesday
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Posted by Doug Barney on November 14, 20060 comments
Yesterday, Sun announced that Java would join Solaris as
a
major product that is now open source
. I'm the kind of guy that admits his
shortcomings (I've got thin wrists and a thick middle), so I'm not ashamed to
say I almost thought Java was already open source (maybe because my open source-junkie
son David is such a Java fan).
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Posted by Doug Barney on November 14, 20060 comments
Microsoft went to the enemy's camp and
made
an announcement at VMworld
this week, but Microsoft's announcement of the
Virtual Hard Disk Test Drive is not exactly a blockbuster. Test Drive is a bunch
of test software, including third-party tools, that show off the virtues of
virtualization. Oh, this is just like what VMware did 12 or so months ago!
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Posted by Doug Barney on November 09, 20062 comments
I love to laugh at people who are wrong, even when it's me. In this case, I
was wrong by agreeing with Gartner, which was horribly wrong. The wildly famous
research company
predicted
that Vista would be late
and not ship until spring 2007 or so.
After seeing so many delays, I figured this was as easy as guessing that Britney
would ditch K-Fed the very week his CD and tour bombed. Gartner was wrong.
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Posted by Doug Barney on November 09, 20061 comments
I had the misfortune of using Windows CE devices twice, and both experiences
were awful. One was an oversized, overweight Palm Pilot-wannabe that ran through
batteries as fast as the interface wore out my patience. Another was a great-looking
subnotebook that froze up more than an agoraphobe at a Toastmasters meeting.
Now that Microsoft is on version
6.0, I might just give this another whirl, as it usually only takes Microsoft
two or three tries to get it right.
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Posted by Doug Barney on November 09, 20060 comments
What do applications like Word, Excel, Exchange and especially SQL Server produce?
Data. And what does one do with data? Why, store it, of course.
And what does storage produce? Money!
The storage software market includes backup, replication, mirroring, high availability,
hierarchical storage (also know as ILM), archiving, storage virtualization,
SANs, NAS and, oh yeah, restore. I'm sure there are a couple dozen categories
I forgot.
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Posted by Doug Barney on November 09, 20060 comments