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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 year 2004 might someday be remembered as the year that venture capitalists got interested in open-source software -- interested enough to fund a number of new companies based on open source, especially Linux. The year saw a number of funding rounds for such companies as high-end Linux cluster fi...
Desperately seeking their future, African countries that virtually no Western commercial software vendors have cared about in the past are turning to free and open software. They are doing so at a pace just quick enough to alarm some commercial software vendors, who fear the prospect of an entire co...
In a move to steal market share from Microsoft Windows, Novell has unveiled Linux Desktop 9. The company claims the new release is robust enough to offer a viable alternative for enterprise Windows users. At the same time, the company also announced of settlement of its antitrust suit against its de...
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...
I love life and I love having choices. I guess you can say I am pro-life and pro-choice. Unfortunately, for most people those labels represent the opposing sides of a very divisive issue. The curious thing is that these terms are not really descriptive of the issue at all. In fact, unless you know...
Black Duck Software has released code designed to help attorneys wade through the multifaceted intellectual property (IP) issues around open-source software. As part of its protexIP solution suite, protexIPTM/license management allows corporate legal teams to manage commercial and open-source softwa...
France built the Maginot Line in the 1930s, a supposedly impenetrable state-of-the-art defense system to protect the country from her long time enemy, Germany. It was meant to prevent a German invasion, but the Germans simply went around it, dealing the French a humiliating defeat in the spring of ...
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...
To be a Linux strategist at Microsoft seems a contradiction, even an oxymoron. It is like being a vegetarian butcher shop owner, or a pacifist Army general. Yet Martin Taylor, with the official title of general manager of platform strategy, must fill just such a role. In a recent Computerworld
Everyone knows PCs are faster than Macs, but Macs cost more. Right? There are two issues here: cost and performance. Right now I want to focus on the cost side of the myth, leaving performance for another column, possibly in late September. For today, I'm simply going to argue that Macs and PCs are ...
The best method known for getting people extremely angry at you is simply to be right where they're wrong -- especially if you give them any opportunity to read a moral subtext into whatever they're wrong about. It's sometimes okay be a tiny bit smarter than the people you work with, but it's always...
Thin client vendors have shown a greater presence at this week's LinuxWorld conference than in the past, with Wyse Technology, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems all offering new products. The moves set the stage for broader deployment of the technology in the coming year. IDC analyst Bob O'Donnel...
Silicon Graphics (SGI) announced that NASA has chosen the company's Altix as the foundation of Project Columbia, a collaboration between SGI and Intel that is expected to foster scientific breakthroughs in space exploration, global warming research and aerospace engineering. For the project, NASA pl...
In a decision that could have far-reaching implications -- from the fate of free software to the technology used in developing countries -- the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has granted the Public Patent Foundation (PubPat) a reexamination of a recently granted patent (number 5,579,517) o...
Cisco Systems is to acquire the assets of Procket Networks in a cash deal valued at US$89 million. Procket Networks was a start-up that raised US$272 million in venture capital thanks to its development of routers it claimed could offer 30 percent to 65 percent savings over more traditional ones. Ci...
Not content to accuse open-sourcers of stealing code and working on Linux programming on company time, the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute now implies that the open-source community rips off The Wall Street Journal. So far, though, ADTI has not suggested that the mothers of those in the open-...
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 ...
Don't make celebratory plans just yet to join the Open Source Solaris Community: Sun Microsystems is only saying that it is looking at its plans to open up the Solaris source code, meaning it could happen months from now, years from now or, in fact, never. Despite reports yesterday that it was a don...
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