Archive

Crowdsourcing may be killing a lot of jobs. True, it's still a nascent business strategy that works well only in certain scenarios, and it can't be lumped in with outsourcing as the cause of mass layoffs. As is the case with outsourcing, though, it can be particularly difficult to quantify crowdsour...

Email was born sometime between 1965 and 1970, depending on how you define its genesis, and by 1980 it was considered by many to be the killer app. It drove the proliferation of PCs in the workplace and allowed people all over the world to work together. SMS texting and tweeting can take some credit...

Is software truly open source if you pay for additional features? Your answer may depend on whether you side with the purists or the, ah, not-so-pure. A recent trend entering the debate involves the marketing of so-called open core software. This morphed business model is not what many open source s...

Application creators can get an early look at the software developer kit for Android 1.5, the next version of the mobile operating system, according to Google. Based on the "Cupcake" branch from the Android Open Source Project, the SDK has application programming interfaces for new features, includi...

Before we can delve into making a scalable application, it's worth spending some time to define just what scalability is and isn't. Contrary to what many novice developers think, scalability is not primarily about performance. Performance is virtually unrelated to the aggregate scalability of an app...

Good things come in small packages, as they say, and that's perhaps never been more true than it is today, thanks to the emergence of increasingly diminutive devices equipped with Linux. Perhaps most notable of late is the $99 Marvell SheevaPlug, a wall-wart-sized device that runs Linux on a 1.2-GHz...

The Linux desktop has traditionally been a very fragmented and niche market, and the mobile Linux space is no different. While choice can be a good thing, fragmentation can be a strong detractor against any one platform gaining traction. What fragmentation means to developers is one, that they have...

I wonder if Levi Strauss would have made billions selling his blue jeans if he had said that the zipper was "sold separately." I wonder if cell phones would be as ubiquitous as they are today if everyone had to learn to speak binary in order to communicate using them. I wonder how many people would ...

While potential customers and the technology press await T-Mobile's G2 smartphone later this year, the wireless carrier is reportedly already knee-deep into the development of the next level of devices powered by the open source Android operating system. The company will roll out a home phone and a ...

Open source healthcare IT solutions are just beginning to become acceptable alternatives to proprietary software systems. As is happening in other fields, open source medical projects are getting noticed as cost-saving alternatives to proprietary vendors. The battle for supremacy between the two mar...

I had an idea the other day: I wondered whether there was a text-messaging application available for Android that offered a soft keyboard similar to the iPhone's. I checked out the Android Market and found that Handcent's SMS app had the highest rating of the messaging apps, so I decided to try it. ...

A group of large and small IT companies and institutions have signed the Open Cloud Manifesto, pledging to work together to establish and promote open standards in cloud computing. Officially, there are now 38 signatories -- a group that includes IBM, AT&T, Sun Microsystems, Novell, Rackspace an...

In a sagging economy, doing business as usual is rarely prudent and usually disastrous. Companies often must change the course of strategies, or in some cases accelerate them. After a spate of business meetings during the marathon that is Mobile World Congress, one takeaway is the acceleration in th...

Having recently completed the second issue of "Hackett and Bankwell," I have been taking inventory of my accomplishments and lessons learned. Two years ago, I was working two jobs, writing Web software by day and configuring Linux servers by night. One job was a corporate situation where a lot of th...

Taking aim at the next generation of computing -- virtualization and the cloud -- Novell on Tuesday unveiled Suse Linux Enterprise 11. Suse Linux Enterprise 11 has been optimized for the major hypervisors -- VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V and Xen. It runs on the x86, Itanium, IBM Power and IBM System...