A few weeks ago, I met with a senior partner of a mid-sized professional services company, whose 100-person firm was recently acquired by a much larger organization. Prior to the acquisition, this partner had overseen IT for his company, as well as other professional matters. With the new management, he had no responsibility or significant […]
One of my favorite bloggers — and favorite people — is Alexandra Weber Morales. I worked with Alexa at Miller Freeman in the mid-1990s, when she was editor of Diagnostic Imaging America Latina; she then succeeded Larry O’Brien as editor of Software Development Magazine. She was laid off in December 2005, when her magazine was […]
The next Software Test & Performance Conference is going to be our biggest and best ever. Many of you may have attended previous STPCon events, including STPCon Spring 2007 held a few weeks ago in San Mateo, Calif. — the first time we brought the conference to the Bay Area. STPCon Fall 2007 returns to […]
Well, that was easy. Turns out the biggest problem with kludging a unidirectional sync from Google Calendar to the BlackBerry (using a Mac as the agent of change) is procrastination. Step 1. Fire up iCal, the calendar application that comes with Mac OS X. Subscribe to the private iCal-formatted feed(s) from the Google Calendar(s) you […]
After years of self-righteous protests, “I ain’t gonna get one of those PDAs,” I’m now hooked on my Blackberry — and that’s with assimilation still in progress.The drive toward the BlackBerry was oblique. First, there was the appeal of the mobile Internet: It would be neat to be able to access a Web page without […]
Microsoft has let it slip that Windows Server Code Name “Longhorn” will be called Windows Server 2008. Check out this screen captured from the Microsoft PressPass section of microsoft.com, the page that covers the forthcoming WinHEC conference. On the right, it shows “related links,” including one for the “Windows Server 2008 reviewers guide.” (Click on […]
The second and final day of Software 2007— CMP Media’s conference for software executives – was very much like the first day, with keynote discussions split between people who had things to say, and people who wanted to get the most value from the fees they paid for the keynote opportunity. (See this earlier entry […]
Real-time blogging: Steve Ballmer just completed a fairly dry, but very loud, sales presentation for Windows Vista and Microsoft Office System for his keynote at Software 2007. More about that later. However, the Q&A session was much more interesting; M.R. Rangaswami, the conf. chairman, did a nice job… they weren’t all softballs. One question/answer is […]
The Software 2007 conference, going on yesterday and today down at the Santa Clara Convention Center, got off to a great start, with a opening keynote address from Hasso Plattner, an SAP co-founder who now also teaches at Stanford. However, the day went downhill after Plattner’s talk. He was followed by keynotes from HP and […]
I’m not a doctor, have no medical training, and fully expect you to dismiss this tirade as “naive.” However, I believe that the practice of pharmaceutical companies paying doctors to prescribe their medicines is outrageous. The catalyst for this comment is a story in today’s New York Times, “Doctors Reap Millions for Anemia Drugs,” which […]
Whenever you have the opportunity to listen to a co-founder of SAP talk about innovation, it’s worth listening. SAP is unusual among the Giant Software Companies in that it’s reinvented itself many times: from a big mainframe enterprise resource planning provider, to a purveyor of massive client/server software, to a maker of a Java application […]
If you thought that the confusion between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 was confusing, what about six Webs? That’s how many that Ray Lane suggested during his talk at “The New Software Industry: Forces at Play, Business in Motion,” a fascinating conference co-hosted last week by Carnegie Mellon West and the University of California, Berkeley. […]
One of the most popular classes at our Software Test & Performance Conference is Rex Black’s “Identify and Mitigate Software Risks Through Testing.” The class is always packed. But because not everyone can make it to STPCon, we’ve decided to bring this class to you. Please join Rex for our first SD Times Live! Training […]
I’ve been going through a fascinating exercise this week, as I streamline the information going to my myriad e-mail addresses. That entails changing the addresses used to receive some information, like newsletters from companies that I buy from or cover as an analyst. In many cases, this process is prompting me to cancel subscriptions to […]
If this story had come out 24 days ago, I’d have called it an April Fool’s hoax, today’s story from ExtremeTech, “New Amigas On The Way, Company Says.“ The story reads, Virtually nothing was released as far as the new designs were concerned, other than the PCs will be based on the PowerPC architecture and […]
Today, we hit the triple jackpot on three big storage advances. First: Hitachi has shipped the first terabyte 3.5-inch hard drive — only five months after my colleague Andrew Binstock predicted that one would go onto the market. The Deskstar 7K1000 is a 7200rpm drive with 4.17ms latency and 8.5ms seek time, according to Hitachi. […]
The smell of global warming is in the air – and no, I’m not talking about greenhouse gases. The second half of April has seen some changes in the somewhat glacial economy that’s bogged down the IT industry for the past seven years. This is a welcome change. The most visible sign of the thaw, […]
For those who read my earlier posting about the complete collection of April Fools’ Day RFCs, the book is finally available for ordering from Amazon.com. (I already pre-ordered it from Barnes & Noble.) Z Trek Copyright (c) Alan Zeichick
David Worthington reported today in on SDTimes.com that Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas,” the next version of Microsoft’s developer toolchain, may be delayed until next year. While Microsoft is increasingly non-committal about deadlines (and for good reasons), the expectation had been that Orcas would ship this year. Instead, according to Soma Somasegar, we should expect […]
Day One of the Software Security Summit kicked off with a keynote from Herbert “Hugh” Thompson, chief security strategist at People Security, and one of the most innovative (and funny) people in our industry. He told a great story which I think illustrates the nature of security vulnerabilities — and the people who find them. […]
Do you use Eclipse? EclipseWorld 2007 is coming up Nov. 7-9 in Reston, Virginia. Right now, we’re reading through many class proposals and speaker abstracts. We’re weighing ideas for keynote speakers, social activities, Birds of a Feather. We’re also planning how to publicize this year’s conference, to make sure that we clearly explain to everyone […]
Lest you think that I only pick on Microsoft, Oracle just released a whopper of a patch list. This Critical Patch Update Pre-Release Notice is a head’s up for security patches coming to dozens of Oracle products on April 17. Oracle rolls up its security patches into quarterly updates. Here’s where you can get a […]
The low-level feud between Sun Microsystems and the Apache Foundation had gone on for years. Apache has consistently maintained that Sun makes it difficult for Apache (and for other non-Sun open source projects) to deliver software that’s compatible with the Java Community Process’ specifications. In response, Sun has offered occasional olive branches (most notably in […]
The irony is ironic: On the same day that I learned about a new Microsoft marketing initiative to sell its customers client, server and network security software, the company released yet another slew of patches to plug up flaws in its products, including Windows Vista. The new marketing initiative is called “Fast, Faster,” and is […]
This should be a fascinating, thought-provoking gathering: On April 30, Carnegie Mellon West’s computer science department, and UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and SSME programs are putting on a conference with a m0dest goal: to forecast the future of the software industry. According to the sponsors, “The consensus is that software, backed by commodity […]
Today, Apple announced that it had sold 100 million iPods. That’s a lot of computers… and yes, that’s what the iPod is. It’s a specialized computer, but it’s a computer nonetheless. So, too, are high-end cell phones and devices like BlackBerries and Palm Treos. Seeing Apple’s news made me realize that I have no idea […]
You’ve gotta love how companies figure ways to make you pay a premium to reduce their cost and increase their profits. Remember back when Touch-Tone dialing was new, and the phone company charged an extra $1 or more per month to enable tone dialing on your account? Their cost was actually lower than if you […]
On the heels of International Data Group’s decision to discontinue the print edition of InfoWorld, Crain’s BtoB reports that the publishing company will be reducing the paper size of its two tabloid-sized newsweeklies to standard magazine trim. According to Crain’s BtoB (which covers the business-to-business media industry), “Given the financial pressure we’re under in mailing […]
I was surprised this morning to find a press release from the creators of I Love Nacho Cheese, the self-described “worldwide leader in nacho cheese related news and entertainment,” announcing that their Web site was written up in the San Jose Mercury News. After double-checking to see that it was really April 5 and not […]
It’s amazing how clever those spammers are. On Oct. 30, 2006, I set up a new mailbox on one of the domains that I manage. It’s a hosted domain held by a major ISP. I just set up the mailbox, but didn’t do anything with it. It’s never sent a message, not even a test […]