Thin clients aren’t a fit for every organisation, but they should be in more widespread use. Faster networks, the increasing prevalence of mobile users, shared work areas, and concerns about client technology being outmoded six months after purchase should put thin back on the map. Other benefits like true lockdown, instant-on, and location-independent sessions are worthwhile no matter what shape the economy is in.
Several readers took me to task for referring to Linux, BSD, and OS X as Unix. Lighten up, folks -- I'm on your side. No one feels more protective of Unix's heritage than I. Unix has a rich legacy that deserves to be preserved and accurately conveyed to new generations of computer scientists. It rattles many of us to see that the operating systems that best exemplify Unix traditions today aren't Unix at all.
Consider being able to move any IT infrastructure easily from its current tasks and redeploy it to any other function as business requirement demands. Tom Yager reports on the promise of the “adaptive” enterprise
With the release of Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Corp. reached an important milestone. Both its desktop and server operating systems are now, by any reasonable measure, finished. With the demise of Windows Me, the company met its goal of extending the NT architecture to all x86 systems. Windows has become the unified platform it was always meant to be.
Last week's "sendmail" vulnerability that turned up in Unix and Linux serves to underscore one fact that's becoming painfully obvious for IT managers. Dealing with security vulnerabilities is now a full-time job. Worse, it eats into staff productivity, wastes resources, and keeps your customer service from being as good as it should be. And to top it all off, you know perfectly well that if you miss what turns out to be a major vulnerability, you're toast.
I am energized by changes to the status quo and challenges to conventional wisdom. This is the most fascinating era I've encountered in 25 years of working in IT. I do see the dark side of the ever-quickening pace of change: frustration. Companies are frustrated by vendors that change their approach almost daily; how can IT plan ahead when that's the case? Vendors are frustrated by the market forces that make such adaptation necessary, and by the lag time between technology changes and the market's understanding of the changes' motives and results. In other words, even when a Sun Microsystems Inc., Microsoft Corp., or Commerce One Inc. can make its internal engineering machinery run faster -- no small feat -- it takes a maddeningly long time before customers grasp the benefits of the effort. So long, in fact, that vendors are forced to kick off a new round of reengineering before they're done teaching the current model to customers.
A hacker, thief, or spy looking to break into (or just disrupt) one of your systems has a big bag of tools at his disposal. The more he knows about your operation, the more specific and sophisticated his intrusion techniques can become. The most damaging attacks exploit weaknesses in enterprise applications. The intruder's best ally is buggy or poorly written software, and unfortunately, almost all large applications contain exploitable bugs.
Sun Microsystems's Greg Papadopoulos shook hands and answered questions in front of the wall-sized panel of white boards he had filled with his charts and diagrams. By the end of his two-hour chat with analysts, he had put a fresh coat of paint on Sun's ages-old tag line, "The network is the computer."
Windows on X86-32 hardware has been the de facto safe platform since the release of Windows NT 4.0 in 1996. PC servers still lead the corporate market in value and breadth of configurations, and IT can thank Microsoft, Intel, and AMD for forcing vendors to commoditize everything from fast hard drives to 512MB memory modules.
Just a couple of years ago, the commercial OS landscape looked bleak. For most businesses the only real options were Windows and platform-bound Unix from IBM Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., or Hewlett-Packard Co.
Upgrading an operating system is never as simple as popping in a CD-ROM and twiddling your thumbs through an automated install. Every OS change requires planning, retraining, and sometimes changes to client systems and custom applications. To make the effort worthwhile, a new OS release must be compelling. In the current corporate climate, with IT budgets and manpower stretched beyond their limits, an upgrade must add significant value to make it onto the schedule.
The future of Web services in the enterprise lies not in hit-and-run applications such as stock quotes, ZIP code validation, and weather updates. Rather, Web services promises to take companies to the next level of automation: Business process integration. Instead of passively routing data from one application to another, BPI drives processes -- and CTOs want it now. Sixty-three percent of respondents to the 2002 InfoWorld Web Services Applications Survey cited BPI as the primary objective of their Web services deployment.
If you have the time, plus a bit of Columbo in you, taking a hands-on approach to security by learning how to hack will give you a jump on your hands-off colleagues. You can learn about new vulnerabilities and exploits days before vendors turn them into anti-virus definitions, OS patches, and IDS (intrusion detection system) signatures. If your curiosity takes you far enough, you'll become expert at finding network holes by applying hackers' tools and knowledge.
Microsoft raised the ire of critics and customers alike by sneaking a new EULA (end-user license agreement) into a critical security patch delivered in June for Windows Media Player. The EULA grants Microsoft the unrestricted right to automatically alter your copy of Windows so that it will "... disable your ability to copy and/or play secure content and use other software on your computer." Well, that only applies to home users of Windows. Surely vendors would never be stupid enough to antagonize corporate customers with such "guilty when charged" intellectual property protection policies, would they?
When the Web first rose to prominence, its simplicity captured imaginations everywhere. For the first time, documents could be encoded, hosted, and viewed on any platform using standards-based software. That seemed too good to be true, and after money got involved, it was.