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.
Included in the suite are RSS tools from SimpleFeed and NewsGator, wikis from
Socialtext, and blogging from Six Apart.
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!
Microsoft has a "BlueScreen
of Death" screen saver that can fool even the savviest IT pro into
thinking that your machine has indeed rolled over and died. I wonder if I can
get a version for my Mac G4?
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.
I hate it when columnists digress by actually saying "I digress,"
so I'll just briefly and slightly change the subject. The Gates quote reminds
me of the day in November 1989 when IBM and Microsoft announced that OS/2 would
serve as the high-end multitasking enterprise OS, and Windows would remain a
low-end product, leading then-Lotus chief Jim Manzi to remark to anyone within
earshot and with press credentials that Windows had been "neutered."
Who knew that desktop operating systems were all male?
Meanwhile, back in Europe, Gates argued that Vista came through the regulatory
process with all of its parts still attached.
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 upgraded
free tool from PreEmptive Solutions -- long known for its obfuscation technology
-- that can hide your code, and it will be bundled with the next round of Visual
Studio. The new rev is more tightly integrated with VS than it has been in the
past.
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.
Consumers, especially crazed gamers, are the ones who line up at midnight,
not Joe IT. Yet consumers this holiday season won't be buying souped-up Vista
machines -- they'll be on hold until next year.
Maybe this is all a secret plot to get folks to shell out $250 for Zune, which
launches this week. I might change my mind on Zune: With wireless and a
neat video screen, it seems to pack more punch than the iPod. As long as they
leave out the Blue Screen of Death, maybe I'll pick one up.
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, a tradition that, while not 18, sure feels like it!
Today's fixes may focus on XML Core Services, which is being hacked as we speak,
as well as Visual Studio. Besides miscellaneous Windows fixes, there's also
a new rev of the Malicious Software Removal Tool (does this remove malicious
software, or maliciously remove software?).
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).
Java just has this image of openness, one that .NET will probably never have
unless it comes with a full General Public License (even David Blaine couldn't
hold his breath that long).
Despite my ignorance, this is a big deal. Java will now be even more embraced
by the young software anarchists who will become tomorrow's code leaders.
I don't happen to think that Microsoft has to make .NET, Visual Studio and
the rest fully open source. But it should think very, very seriously about giving
Java the exact same consideration as Visual Basic and Visual C#.
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!
VMware isn't above mimicking the success of others. VMware Lab Manager sounds
uncannily similar to what Surgient and others have been up to for a while --
using virtualization to develop and test large software deployment before they
are actually deployed.
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.
Vista
is done, or in Redmond parlance, has been "released to manufacturing."
Instead of just being finished, it's RTM. Can we make the simple any more complicated?
If you are a major corporate customer, the real deal will be downloadable any
day now!
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.
Windows Embedded CE 6.0 isn't so much aimed at handhelds and the like (that
is now the purview of Windows Mobile), but will power set-top boxes and other
dedicated devices.
Developers may be interested to know that apps can be built with Visual Studio
2005, and that qualified developers can get access to source code in an almost
open source way.
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.
Microsoft, I'd guess, has the categories all memorized, including the average
annual revenue and trailing five-year growth for each area.
Redmond is slowly getting into the storage market. As owner of the OS and some
of the bigger data-producing apps, this makes a lot of sense.
Leading the charge is the Microsoft
Universal Distributed Storage plan, an attempt to bring Windows-centric
standards to the storage market. And if you've ever tried to get fibre channel
arrays from EMC to work with Network Appliance NAS boxes and talk to an Intel
iSCSI box, you'll welcome any move toward standards. And if you end up shelling
out a few dollars for Windows Storage Server of Microsoft System Center Data
Protection Manager, so be it.
Posted by Doug Barney on November 09, 20060 comments