I recently emceed a Webcast titled "Sustaining Open Source Benefits" (see www.networkworld. com, DocFinder: 7828). The interviewees were Ernest Prabhakar, Apple's Darwin product manager on the Mac OS X team who is responsible for open source, Unix marketing and Xgrid; and Peter Burris, president and chief research officer at Appergy, an early-stage IT services firm.
Port80 Software recently sent me an interesting press release. According to its recent "Top 1000 Application Servers Survey" of Fortune 1000 companies, use of Microsoft's ASP.NET, ASP, and Internet Information Server beat all of the competition combined.
Being the kind of technical person you are, you most likely identify with the old-time hacker ethic and disdain the popular use of the word "hacker" when "cracker" would be more apropos.
If there is one development process that will drive your programmers nuts it is serious testing of browser-based applications written in JavaScript. Casual testing is not a problem but regression testing with browser-based systems tends to be difficult and sloppy because of the lack of testing tools.
The recent tsunami tragedy should make us all realize that no matter how unlikely a catastrophe might seem, the potential exists.
Anonymous Internet use - particularly for Web surfing - was a really hot topic a couple of years ago and the whole idea appears to be gaining a resurgence of interest, mainly because of consumer concerns over privacy and security.
It was "a real concern", according to Stephen Mahaney, president of Planet Ocean Communications, an "Internet marketing company", that Symantec Norton Internet Security 2004 installs, by default, with ad blocking switched "on".
Once upon a time, there were only Unix machines on the Internet. No, really, you could look as hard as you liked and all you would find were *nixen from wall to wall.
Macromedia most certainly is not resting on its laurels. Recently the company released Version 1.0 of Flex (formerly codenamed Royale), a server designed to make it easier to use a Flash interface to present Web applications - now somewhat irritatingly called RIAs, Rich Internet Applications.
It seems that the business expansion strategy for successful portal-type sites is to open up to developers. We've seen this move from Amazon, eBay, and now, from PayPal one of the e-commerce 800-pound gorillas.
I hear far too many stories about non-IT people who simply don't "get it" when it comes to their PCs. What these people don't get is that, whether they like it or not, they are responsible for how they use corporate IT resources, which includes how they accidentally abuse them. These willful people need a name we can identify them by . . . how about "itiots"?
We all know that our corporate operating system monoculture is dangerous, but most of us also recognize that we have been willing participants in the creation of it. It wasn't that we knew better when we started down this track, and it wasn't that we had a lot of choice. But that period of innocence collapsed like a cheap deck chair.
A couple of weeks ago at the RSA Conference, Microsoft revealed it is taking a new approach to computer security called “behaviour blocking”.
Adobe's PDF is a great tool but, as I argued in one of my columns some years ago, it is frequently used quite unnecessarily by lazy marketing and sales people. These folks refuse to understand that document layout fidelity is only important when it is relevant - that one-page sales brochure dumped into PDF should not be the only format for what is essentially generic information.
If there is one thing we would like to do for our users it's make their lives simpler. And the way we'd like to do that is limit what they can do. If we could lock down their PCs so they could do only five or seven things and not the 120,915,412 things they are wont to do, we would be happier. Then they could get their work done without loading software, playing solitaire and running applications we haven't approved.