To the extent that it's possible, I'm declaring today the beginning of recorded history in information technology. On this day, the phrase "information technology," abbreviated IT, came into being as shorthand for electronic devices that aid humans in storage and sharing of, analysis of, protection of, and access to significant amounts of digitized content. Content? That's anything you're capable of holding in your brain for even a nanosecond. IT is not a department or a group of people. It's a smart phone. It's a room full of SPARC servers. A telephone headset? A keyboard? I don't know. They're new terms. We'll work that out as we go. I do know that if we didn't have such things, information technology would be inaccessible.
Inexplicably, we've gotten through much of 2006 without Linux completely kicking Unix out of the market. Analysts and Linux faithful are at a loss to explain how Sun Microsystems' server revenue climbed almost 14 percent since the second quarter last year, pushing Sun ahead of Dell in the rankings. Gartner pegs Sun's Unix server market share at 56.9 percent.
My city's symphony orchestra is marvelous. In a lesser setting, any of the orchestra's musicians would be a marquee soloist, front and center. But as an orchestra, about 100 consummately talented artists become one. The visual spectacle and the sociology of an orchestra is the reason I go to the symphony rather than buy the CD.
Intel has been beating out a steady rhythm of big product announcements in recent months. And last week that beat went on: The company shipped Merom, the mobile entry in Intel's 64-bit Core 2 Duo processor line.
Barely 10 years ago, I ventured that all systems would be virtualized, and that IT law would dictate that no operating system may have unregulated direct contact with system or storage hardware.
I have prepared an account of the history of .Net and Java that's intended to balance more fanciful post-mortem accounts (of .Net and Java, not of me). It reads thus: Sun created Java to cash in on the success of Visual Basic and to convince development managers that C++ coders are all slobbering toddlers playing with nail guns. Sun did grant C++ dispensation for "performance-sensitive applications," a category that covered most of Sun's software catalog. Microsoft created .Net to keep Java from gaining traction and to put that cross-platform nonsense to rest once and for all. One OS, one run-time, many languages was the best way to go. C#, the Microsoft alternative to Java with the honesty to use "C" in its name, still kept the pencils and paper clips away from the inmates, except, of course, for those developers working on performance-sensitive applications, a category that covered most of Microsoft's software catalog.
Before the Xen project popped up on my radar three years ago, I'd never heard of paravirtualization. In this technique, an altered version of an operating system redirects privileged operations -- the bare metal code that restructures virtual memory and communicates with devices -- to a thin "hypervisor" layer, instead of sending them directly to the CPU. It's far, far more efficient than intercepting and redirecting privileged operations at the CPU instruction level, as VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server, and other hardware emulation-based virtualization solutions must do.
Improvements include simplified admin, client security boost.
An ugly truth about the IT job market is that opportunists too often dominate it. Honest employers and job candidates suffer because they're forced to compete with cutthroats. Black hat employers see workers through the lens of the recession -- as property to be loaded, spent, and replaced like rounds in a Gatling gun. Black hat workers see themselves through the lens of the dot-com heyday -- demigods who could write their own tickets with junior college skills.
I admit to frequently harboring unrealistic expectations. With that in mind, here's my early take on why hiring managers are having a hard time finding good tech workers in the United States.
Apple Computer extended the courtesy of meeting with me one day after my column on the <a href="http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;880512017;fp;16;fpid;0">closing of the OS X x86 kernel source code</a> was published online.
There are only a few markets ideally suited for virtualization. One of them is software development. As the scene is usually painted, the developer sits at his or her desk, compiles new software, and launches it in a virtual machine so that when it crashes, it doesn't take the whole box down.
This week's spike in my job-satisfaction index is sponsored by that least likely of catalysts, Dell Computer. Dell's acquisition of the low-volume, high-end PC maker Alienware is so strategically brilliant that I may have to find a new exemplar for the lack of vision and innovation that typifies the PC market (any suggestions?).
A new alliance headed by EMC's VMware division hopes to make it easier to deploy virtualised desktops in the enterprise and make bulky, unmanageable standalone PCs a thing of the past.
AMD has its hands in a lot of technology areas, and I track and report on all of them. I'm a huge fan of AMD's Athlon FX and X2 client CPUs, Turion notebook CPUs, and Geode ultra-low power technology. But I know the AMD you care most about is the one that will turn your entire server room into a one-rack, one-man operation.