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Some friends of mine are considering setting up a new company around an e-commerce idea and asked me to research the cost of the IT infrastructure needed. As part of that, I went Web shopping for a low end server to get them started, and found some surprises. Note that all pricing data shown below i...

When Hewlett-Packard announced, just recently, that it was combining the headquarters operations of its PC and printing divisions, but would continue to report their results separately, I assumed they were doing it to provide legal cover for the transfer of costs from the PC side to the printing sid...

One of the oddest facts about the Wintel versus Unix (including Linux and the Mac) debate is that the Wintel proponents practically brag about never having actually used Unix while the most committed Mac/Unix advocates have generally used both. If in reality the Unix products really are better, fast...

Two weeks ago, I asked for reader aid in getting documentation on early 1990s System VR4 Unix to help understand what things can be done with Linux today but could not be done with AT&T System VR4. The question was naive and I need more help (and aspirin) in struggling toward a better answer tha...

When does background noise among alarmists become actionable intelligence? Should managers who read then U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry's 1964 declaration that smoking causes cancer have reacted immediately by banning smoking in the workplace and preferentially hiring nonsmokers? Should IT manage...

The English language is a great tool. It's expressive, powerful, inclusive, and evolves through the democratic and open-source processes of accepting change on the basis of common usage. Great, but you know what it doesn't have? Enough useable swear words. Think about it, you probably know eight to ...

About two weeks ago Linus Torvalds was reported as having said that Solaris has nothing to teach him. That surprised me because my mental picture of Linux is that of a typical early 1990s megakernel -- years ahead of Microsoft's Windows servers, but not exactly state of the art by any standard and f...

I've been rereading David Brin's first Uplift series -- as astonishingly self-consistent a vision of galactic life as any science fiction writer has ever offered and quite appropriate to the Christmas season. In Brin's imaginary universe, a mysterious and long-gone race known as the progenitors set ...

Until quite recently, Oracle's salespeople would recommend Sun hardware because SPARC offered the memory, processor speed and reliability needed to make the database product seem pretty good. Today, however, Oracle sees Lintel (Linux on Intel) as its route to a bigger share of the customer's budget....

What differentiates a Mac user from a PC user, assuming the usage decision is uncoerced by an employer? My wife answered that question with a list straight from Jeff Foxworthy: You think virus protection is what you get a flu shot for; You actually make a conscious choice in selecting your Web brows...

If a couple of guys build a company from scratch and then do a billion dollar IPO, where does the market value come from? More importantly, what does the valuation process mean to the typical business employee? I got to thinking about this during a review of online gaming a couple of weeks ago becau...

During a break in a series of discussions on US HIPAA compliance for Canadian health care players, one of the attendees regaled the group with a long brag about how his company's techies had defeated a phishing attack. According to the story, the company's wizards had discovered a phishing attack ba...

I recently had the opportunity, as part of a review of what works in systems security, to look closely at a couple of massively multi-user online games including "EverQuest" and "Star Wars Galaxies." Several of these now support up to half a million registered users and go beyond simple player co-op...

President Bush has made it clear that tort reform, narrowly construed in terms of medical liability reform, is on the short-term agenda. In theory, that should be easily done and very positive in its effects, but of course, reality is never as simple as theory, and there are some real risks to open ...

The newly released Solaris 10 includes a radical new technology called DTrace which lets you look inside the usual black box of a running production application to see exactly where the bottlenecks are and what their impact is. As a result, I've been telling clients with big Solaris operations that ...

About two months ago, I looked at the cost of the Macintosh relative to Dell PCs and discovered that not only are Macs cheaper than PCs once you upgrade the PCs to rough comparability, but the PC line is narrower than Apple's, with Dell offering nothing to compare to the 17-inch Apple powerbook, the...

A few weeks ago, I wrote a commentary on electronic voting for the Washington Dispatch in which I argued that what makes it possible for conspiracy theorists to use e-voting as the basis of an attack on the legitimacy of an expected Bush victory on November 2 is the client-server architectu...

As regular readers of this column know, I'm a big fan of the Apple Macintosh, but I'm much less of a fan of Apple Canada in general and their dealers in the Toronto area in particular. This morning (Tuesday, October 19) I needed an external power adapter for a 17-inch titanium -- since it doesn't ha...

I've never gotten the hang of casual chit chat, and I blew it again the other day. We were at one of those things preceded by a wifely lecture about my behavior, and I really thought I was doing pretty well when the "conversation" meandered to I Robot. Since this was the first movie mention...

As con men the two pitiful rascals in "Huckleberry Finn" made their living by pretending to be what they were not, and then charging the gullible to share the illusion. A cynic might see parallels to Red Hat here: pretending to open source ideals while actually charging the MSCE community for the pr...