TECH NOTES

Revised WinXP policy dooms Linux desktop prospects without real OEM marketing efforts
Click title to read rest of article at ZDNet.com…

Paula Rooney
September 25th, 2007

It should come as no surprise that HP is considering expanding its Linux PC efforts, given that its top rival is selling Ubuntu Linux PCs in the U.S and Microsoft is trying to kill any potential interest in them.

HP began selling Red Hat Linux PCs in Australia and is reportedly considering expanding that pilot program to other nations, including the U.S.

Contacted yesterday, an HP spokeswoman denied that the PC giant confirmed any such plan to media outlets. But she would not deny the reports. HP, like any other company, is constantly reviewing its PC strategies, she would only say.

NetBeans vs. Eclipse, this time with attitude
Click title for source at ZDNet.com…

Ed Burnette
September 19th, 2007

After months of regular milestones and community feedback, Sun has released a Beta version of NetBeans 6.0. NetBeans is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) written for programmers who use Java, Ruby, C/C++, and other languages. It competes for developer mindshare with Eclipse, Microsoft Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEA, and many other free and commercial IDEs.

Long time readers of this blog know that I’m something of an Eclipse fanboy, having written a couple of books on Eclipse and winning the first Eclipse Top Ambassador award. But I believe you should always be on the lookout for the best tools to get your job done. Before Eclipse I was a happy Visual Studio user for several years, and before that I was heavily into emacs (which isn’t really an IDE but it’s close enough). If I hadn’t been open to new tools and ideas I’d probably still be using some homegrown text editor and a command line.

While I’m not switching to NetBeans (or anything else) any time soon, I do find much to admire in this new release and the philosophy behind it. I had a hard time coming up with a good word to describe this but let’s call it: the NetBeans attitude. I want to expand on this because I think there’s a very important lesson for other software projects. So if you’re looking for a highly technical point-by-point review or comparison of NetBeans then this ain’t it.
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The six consumer technologies that are destroying traditional IT
Click title for source at TechRepublic.com…

Jason Hiner
September 14th, 2007

Earlier this year, the researchers at the Gartner Group published a series of reports on the invasion of consumer technologies into the enterprise and the challenges that this phenomenon has created for IT departments. Gartner has wrapped all of that research into a special report called Consumerization: The IT Civil War. If this really is a war, I think it’s fair to say that IT is losing.

Many users are circumventing IT by using widely available technologies such as Yahoo Messenger, Gmail, USB drives, and BlackBerry phones to help them accomplish their tasks at work. The practice is so common that The Wall Street Journal has even published an entire article aimed at helping business users circumvent their own IT departments. I wrote a diatribe about how irresponsible it was for WSJ to publish that article, but that does not diminish the fact that this is happening everywhere and IT has become virtually powerless to stop it.

Gartner Analyst Jeff Comport, said, “There’s a reason people are trying to use this kind of technology and very often it’s to do their jobs better… We have IT very often coming from a world of budgets, controls, and projects, and they have spent their lives keeping this kind of stuff out.” As a result, “It’s almost become a sport for users to vilify IT,” said Comport.

Let’s take a look at the six consumer technologies that are causing IT the most trouble and then consider what IT can do to turn around a situation that is quickly going from bad to worse in many places.
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Was The Windows Registry a Good Idea?
Click title for source at CodingHorror.com…

August 28, 2007

One of the hot new features introduced with Windows 95 was the Windows Registry. The Windows Registry offered a centralized database-like location to store application and system settings. No more plain text .INI files splattered all over your system. Instead, issue a few easy API calls and your application settings are safely nestled away deep inside the registry hive.

But after living with the Windows Registry for more than a decade, I’m starting to wonder if we were better off with those .INI files.


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Can Vista SP1 help polish Vista’s tarnished image?
Click title for source at ZDNet.com…

Mary Jo Foley
August 21st, 2007

Call it complaining. Call it whining. The end result is the same: Windows Vista’s image is tarnished. And it’s corroding more and more rapidly as the weeks are going on.

Microsoft has dismissed much of the Vista criticisms as coming from hard-core and hard-to-satisfy techies who always want more and better. But even some of Microsoft’s biggest customers and closest developers are going public with their reasons why a number of things in Vista that are just plain bad. And these are people who have been working with Vista builds for years, not those feeling panicked when confronted with the new and unfamiliar.

Can Microsoft do anything to stop the Vista bashing? I think it can. But I’m not sure officials are willing to change course at this point.
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Too much security can be overbearing: Microsoft
Click title for source at APCMag.com…

James Bannan (Microsoft)
8th August 2007

When does too much security become, well, too much? According to Steve Riley, senior security strategist at Microsoft, it becomes too much when the cost of mitigating the risk outweighs the cost of that which you are trying to protect.

Steve’s approach to security spans all horizons, not just information technology. He elaborated on this theory in an afternoon session today at Microsoft Tech.Ed entitled “Making the Tradeoff: Be Secure or Get Work Done”.

The cost of securing an asset is not simply the absolute cost of purchasing an enterprise firewall or business-wide malware software, according to Riley. It’s measured against the current cost of leaving things as they are – if a couple of machines go down every week because of security vulnerabilities, that is a cost which can be measured and taken into consideration. However, if the cost is actually less than the cost of removing the problem, bizarre as it may sound, it might not actually be worth it.
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Where’s XML Going?
Click title for source at OReillyNet.com…

Kurt Cagle
July 19, 2007

Recently I passed both my 44th birthday and my 15th wedding anniversary, just signed my daughter up for high school and was told by my doctor that my HDL was soundly thrashing my LDL. My beard, which I’ve worn since my early twenties, is now streaked with gray (a curse of red hair, I fear), and I notice that lately the stairs seem to have mysteriously begun to grow from one trip to the next. T.S. Elliot is beginning to become … relevant … to me. All signs, perhaps, that I am no longer the young spring chicken I once was.

As I was thinking about things to write for this particular column, this realization about age began to sink in about the standard that I’ve spent the last decade writing about. A decade is a long time in computer circles, especially when you figure that there’s only been five or six of them in the whole history of computing. XML has gone from being a “standard” that perhaps a couple dozen people worldwide knew about to a pervasive technology that is so well entrenched that many people don’t really even think much about it any more. We argue about the XMLification of word processing and spreadsheet programs, we debate whether Atom or RSS 2.0 will predominate, we shake our heads at the whole notion of web services and how the dominant web services protocol was designed largely by bloggers to let people know about their websites.
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Trojan Horse iPhone
Click title for source at ZDNet.com…

June 28th, 2007
by Tom Foremski

The Telcos have become the biggest obstacle to the development of new technologies and services. They have become the most backward elements in our society when it comes to rolling out new technologies, applications, and services.

They have filed lawsuits to stop public wireless networks, and they constantly seek to control anything that could threaten their markets. They maintain the digital divide by keeping Internet access prices far higher than they should be.

They control the cell phone and all of its features, disabling built-in functions when it suits them. And they control the services can be offered over their networks.

They don’t compete against each other, their pricing is almost identical, almost cartel-like. The only competitive activity they engage in is in advertising campaigns.
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Cross-platform open source threat: Is open source really more secure?
Click title for source at TechRepublic.com…

May 25th, 2007
John McCormick

Sophos has disclosed the existence of a proof-of-concept worm (StarOfficeBadbunny) that attacks through a vulnerability in OpenOffice and other programs using StarBasic macros. According to Sophos, this is a multi-platform threat affecting Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. It is written in several scripting languages, including Perl.

While this particular threat is minor, it does illustrate a growing problem. I am all in favor of open source code, but I have never bought into the idea that it was less vulnerable to attack.

Just to start out on the right foot with open source fans, I like OpenOffice, and I often recommend it to small business clients and individuals who need Microsoft Office-like applications but don’t like Microsoft prices. I also like and use Firefox and Linux, and I recommend both as well as other open source software.

Sometimes the more security-savvy of my friends and customers say to me, “Oh, you recommend OpenOffice (Linux, etc.) because you think it is safer!” In a practical, everyday sense, yes — if you run Linux, you are less likely to be hacked.
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Three more things that the Linux community doesn’t get
Click title for source at ZDNet.com…

May 23rd, 2007
Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

The response to the Five crucial things the Linux community doesn’t understand about the average computer user post I made the other day was, well overwhelming. With some of you I think that the post rung a bell, while with others it must have touched a nerve. I’m pretty sure that getting over 750 TalkBack comments in a couple of days is some kind of record here at ZDNet and just in case there’s an award, I’m already writing my speech!

Anyway, after wading through some of the comments (I don’t know how some of you managed to keep up with the conversation in real time … you deserve some kind of award too) I’ve realized that I missed three more points about regular PC users that some in the Linux community (the more vocal members perhaps?) just don’t get.
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