Opinions

Would you pay several times more for a technology that yields only dubious performance advantage? How about if that technology is experiencing a high rate of product returns from early adopters?

Network traffic data holds a wealth of information about application response time, network usage and bandwidth consumption. Getting at that data in an efficient and inexpensive manner would help network managers better understand and control their networks.

Microsoft's impending announcement at Black Hat on the 7th of this month, titled "Secure the Planet! New Strategic Initiatives from Microsoft to Rock Your World", being delivered by some of the best security names inside Microsoft, has already gained the attention of many in the wider community.

It seems that every decade or so I get the opportunity to write an article on IT deja vu. This time around, the topic is cloud computing, which is the latest IT buzz word.

Some recent stories I’ve read, and conversations with senior industry folk, have brought an old question back into the spotlight – how many distributors should a vendor have in any particular market?

The ongoing battle for control over Yahoo seems to have reached a temporary truce. Corporate raider, Carl Icahn, successfully managed to gain some traction on the company's board, however the company's existing leadership received strong support from the remaining shareholders.

You may have noticed this has been a slow week in Cringeville. Well now the truth can be told. For the past five days I've been held captive in Amsterdam by a small group of mad Dutchmen. They locked me in the tower of a Swiss hotel, trundled me into a van with three other captives, drove us around the Dutch countryside until we were disoriented, and forced us to consume vast quantities of rich foods delivered in thimble-sized portions accompanied by heroic volumes of tangy Teutonic wine. It was Hell.

Two entries in a row about .Net. What is this blog coming to?

In South Korea, the world's most online country (by percentage), the Internet has become a tool of politics as much as it has a tool for the everyday Web surfer. When a former CEO took the reins of the country earlier this year, it was effective use of the Internet which contributed to his rise to power. According to Reuters, the power that helped the new president Lee Myung-bak take power is now threatening the ongoing survival of his government.

Virtualization on the Mac has never had it so good. There are several options available for running almost any x86-based operating system as a VM under Mac OS X, including Parallels, VMware Fusion, and VirtualBox. If you like the fact that Macs are less prone to problems, viruses, and spyware, but you simply have to run a few Windows applications, it's a great time to be alive.

Many IT executives consider the WAN to be a monolithic entity: a giant network that connects all the organization's sites across a common infrastructure.

While using an AMD Barcelona (quad-core Opteron) server to create a portable benchmarking kit for InfoWorld's Test Center, I discovered something unexpected: I could incur variances in some benchmark tests ranging from 10 to 60 per cent through combined manipulation of the server's BIOS settings, BIOS version, compiler flags, and OS release.

At this point in the game, Microsoft should really come clean with a statement that rescinds its Linux/patent/suing threat altogether. Granted, Microsoft put itself in a hard spot with this one, since it had its channel singing the same tune for those murky months after the threat. If it stands up says, "Sorry, just kidding!" that won't make the channel partners happy, particularly if they used the threat to convince customers they must buy SUSE or Windows over Red Hat and other distros. But the fact is, we are seeing actions by Microsoft that indicate that the "suing Linux users" jig is up.

If you missed the recent news it appears that Google has gone, in effect, head to head with Wikipedia, but with differences.

When it comes to running application security audits many organizations make the mistake of assuming that only Internet-facing, browser-based Web applications deserve scrutiny. After all, thick client applications tend to face inside and tend to be compiled binaries so they are less risk of malicious tampering.