Tabloid: Opinions

My favourite book or movie ...is Shawn of the Dead. Any film that manages to set a love story within a Zombie movie can only be funny. Parts of it still make me cry with laughter.

Can Cellnet's founders turn the ailing distributor around?

I was once renowned and reviled for my lack of regard for Visual Basic. I have since reformed, realising that we all benefit from languages that target developers at different skill levels and shorten the distance between concept and delivery. Modern server compute power and capacity more than offset the performance limitations of Visual Basic and its follow-ons .Net and Java.

Although it was just Turkey Day [Thanksgiving] here in the US, I've been feasting on the baloney coming out of Sony BMG. After stonewalling for two weeks, the music giant finally recalled its XCP copy-protected CDs and set up a disc exchange program. (Contrary to what I said in a recent column, however, Sony's "fix" doesn't remove the rootkit, only the cloaking.) Meanwhile, it seems XCP may itself break copyright law by violating an open source code licence. Sounds like Sony is suffering from irony poisoning.

In Part One of my look at Novell last week(Novell faces setbacks in open source strategy 30/11/05), my topic was empty chairs. This week, I'll look at the other side of the story. There are new bodies occupying key seats at Novell these days, a sure sign that the company's bid to regain its prominence in the server software market isn't over yet.

This year was the year of the unremarkable - nothing earth shattering happened that would change the face of computing as we know it. It was evolution, not revolution. But that is not a bad thing for the channel - less obsolete inventory, longer lifecycles and falling prices as economies of scale were realised gave resellers a chance to breathe easy.

Former Tech Pacific boss, Kerry Baillie, would sometimes refer to the distributor's TechLink website as the Resellers' Bible. This wasn't an idle boast; it gave him a sense of pride that even dealers who didn't frequently source product through Tech Pac would use the site as a pricing yardstick because of the depth and breadth of stock it contained.

Are Office Live and Windows Live Microsoft's response to Google? Microsoft's announcement of these new online services was interesting and there are implications for IT folks.

Several readers wrote in to correct a recent column in which I accidentally reversed my Generation X and Y coordinates: X are the slackers, whereas the Y generation is into self-mutilation. Another reader called me an aging boomer and blamed my generation for Enron and Iraq, among other debacles. Why don't we just call them all - X, Y and Z - Generation Whine?

Whatever one might think of the technology that Cisco sells, few would argue against the company's success as a marketing machine. For its competitors, making progress against Cisco has often been as productive as trench warfare in World War I. But that might be changing.

In yet another twist to its suit against IBM, the SCO Group detailed 217 alleged violations of its proprietary Unix code - in a sealed document only the judge can read. I hear the new evidence reveals the name of the insider who leaked the code: Lewis "Sco-oter" Libby. Remember, you read it here first.

Bill Gates' recent announcement that Microsoft would soon be in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) business should be taken as a warning sign to the faithful: Something is rotten in Redmond.

It appears corporate America is struggling to keep Generation X workers happy. According to a recent survey, Gen Xers change jobs every 1.1 years and are junkies for increased intellectual stimulation, telecommuting and bosses they can talk to. As boomers burn out, companies will be forced to offer lunch break tattoo sessions and encounter sessions with their supervisors to keep employees interested. In the old days we called that abuse; now it's considered a perk.

Picture this scenario: Suppose Company A acquires Company B, a hardware vendor that incorporates the Linux kernel into its products. After the acquisition is complete, however, an unfortunate thing happens. Linux developers bring suit against Company B, alleging violations of the Gnu GPL (General Public License). As part of the settlement, Company A agrees to open source all of Company B's code, even the previously proprietary parts.

Remember when America Online and Time Warner merged to create a $US350 billion beast that would swallow the Internet?

In the red corner we have the traditional phone system providers; in the blue are computer retailers and network support companies. At this stage, both have equal rights to claim this emerging space but VoIP logically sits more in the IT networking domain than that of the phone suppliers. However, like the multimedia convergence battle, will the IT industry lose another market it is best equipped to service?