Nov 11th, 2008 - There's a kerfuffle brewing in the Sunshine State over who owns the rights to the software that powers certain alcohol breath-test machines. The outcome may mean the difference between a valid or false DUI charge on your permanent driving record. The machine in question, the Intoxilyzer 8000,... (Read More)

Nov 3rd, 2008 - If the state of the economy has got you down and you're ready to stop throwing money at commercial software vendors, you might be overwhelmed at the amount of open source options that exist. Buck up, IT soldier, here are three applications that let you dip your toes in the pool without jumping in... (Read More)

Oct 29th, 2008 - Good IT management doesn't take place in a vacuum. If you're going to make the right decisions and lead people in ways that will make them want to follow, you need an arsenal of information. Of course, overworked CIOs and IT managers don't have time to sift through hundreds of industry articles a... (Read More)

Aug 26th, 2008 - There's an old and tired theory that open source solutions in enterprise are risky because there's no "single throat to choke" if things go wrong. It's time to retire that worn out idea. The process goes something like this: The IT department gets into a discussion with the big bosses about how... (Read More)

Nov 6th, 2008 - Microsoft announced a new program the other day called Microsoft BizSpark, where they give away a boat load of software and services to young startups and presumably lock them into Microsoft long-term. For a small start-up with little capital, this has to be a very attractive offer. Microsoft... (Read More)

Sep 10th, 2008 - This morning EMC, Microsoft and IBM announced they had worked together over a two-year period to create a content interchange standard for enterprise content management systems. It may not sound like much, but it's meaningful on several levels. For content management customers, it means it will... (Read More)

Aug 14th, 2008 - Community journalism encourages members of the community to participate in the news process, not just as passive readers, but as active producers of the news itself. This direct connection to the product is similar in many ways to the kind of community building that goes on in open source... (Read More)

Jun 24th, 2008 - Last week Adobe surprised a few people—well, at least it surprised me--with the announcement that it was including Alfresco content management services as part of its LiveCycle Enterprise Suite Update 1 package. The surprise was two-fold, that Adobe felt it was necessary to add content management... (Read More)

Jun 11th, 2008 - I spent the day yesterday at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston, all in all a fascinating day and great conference, but what caught my attention was a presentation by two representatives of the CIA, and I’m not talking about the Culinary Institute of America, but *the* CIA, as in the preeminent intelligence... (Read More)

Apr 21st, 2008 - Zoho, makers of an online office suite and business tools, aimed mostly at small to medium sized businesses, made its best effort to make a big splash last week when it announced it was introducing an enterprise version of the Zoho CRM product. Unfortunately, Zoho’s announcement was timed in the... (Read More)

Oct 14th, 2008 - The other day, I saw an article on Forbes.com named Ellison Shoots Hole in Cloud and just had to read further. I did read it. The whole thing. I was puzzled, then I laughed, and finally I was mystified by his comments. The article made me wonder just what the hell is wrong with Larry Ellison and... (Read More)

Oct 27th, 2008 - Zephyr today launched version 2.0 of its namesake software test management tool, which is now available as a SaaS in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. Zephyr gives development teams a Flash-based system for communication, collaboration, resource, document and project management, test-case creation... (Read More)

Jun 8th, 2008 - If you’re a Ruby or Python developer building AJAX applications, you’ve got to learn JavaScript. Even if you’re converting Ruby code to client-side JavaScript with a tool like RJS, it can still be helpful to know the AJAX component for adding features and debugging. Now Microsoft is promoting... (Read More)

Sep 16th, 2008 - Zend Technologies today is set to announce a series of alliances intended to allow its PHP framework and development environment to work with other widely deployed RIA technologies from Adobe, Dojo and IBM. In a keynote speech at ZendCon, the company's annual PHP developer conference in Cupertino,... (Read More)

Aug 28th, 2008 - Most of the reports out yesterday about the release of Internet Explorer 8Beta 2 focused on its so-calledInPrivate Browsing, which leaves no trace of the Web sites you visit and protects anonymity. And while that's certainly useful, developers are likely to be more interested in its improvements in... (Read More)

Aug 25th, 2008 - In the late 1990s an innovative company called Enroute Imaging came out with QuickStitch, a program that could analyze a series of digital photos and "stitch" them together into a single image. It cleverly figured out where the image data repeated and combined the photos seamlessly. It was really... (Read More)

Aug 14th, 2008 - It’s a new day for open source developers. A U.S. Federal appeals court yesterday ruled that someone releasing code under an open source license can control future use of that code using copyright law. That’s important because copyright laws carry stronger remedies—including court injunction—along... (Read More)

Jun 20th, 2008 - Less than a year after launching its high performance computing strategy, Microsoft finds its HPC Server 2008 near the top of the heap. The Windows Server 2008 derivative placed 23rd on a list of the 500 top-performing supercomputers in the world, as measured by the National Center for... (Read More)

Jun 18th, 2008 - Apple has done it again. This time with SproutCore, a JavaScript framework that simplifies development of native-looking Web-based applications without the need for Flash or any other specialized runtime. Apple has reportedly contributed loads of resources to the project, which was originally... (Read More)

Jun 16th, 2008 - Web developers everywhere might be breathing a collective sigh of relief today as eBay opened its APIs, which it says will simplify the job of creating add-ons for the online auction site and integrate it with enterprise applications. But perhaps more valuable to some is the access gained to the... (Read More)

Jun 2nd, 2008 - A year ago last week, Facebook released the Facebook Platform, enabling users of the social network to create their own applications. Today, 400,000 developers and 24,000 applications later, the company introduced the Facebook Open Platform, which releases much of the Facebook Platform source code... (Read More)

Jun 1st, 2008 - With all this talk about cheaper laptops for the third world, it’s easy to miss how inexpensive memory has become for us members of the first. I once prophesized to a colleague that by the end of this decade, a terabyte hard drive would be available for less than US$100. I was referring, of course,... (Read More)

May 27th, 2008 - Here’s a new twist on the open source craze. Fabless chip and system designer Via Technologies has released to the community OpenBook, a reference design for a low cost ultra portable laptop that runs Windows or Linux at up to 1.2 GHz and includes WiFi, BlueTooth and high-res 3D graphics... (Read More)

May 23rd, 2008 - I laugh inside when Microsoft loses ground, even in the slightest way. It’s particularly sweet when Redmond loses to a company like Novell, which owned the LAN market it pioneered through the 1990s, only to have it ripped from its grasp by the totally inferior Windows NT. This week Novell’s Miguel... (Read More)

May 2nd, 2008 - Watch out Java; Adobe wants a bigger bite of your mobile-device market share pie. The company yesterday said it will drop its licensing fee for including its Flash Player on handhelds and unveiled alliances with some of world’s largest telecom carriers, content providers and chip and handset... (Read More)

Apr 27th, 2008 - Yahoo Inc., the apple of Microsoft’s eye in recent weeks, has unveiled improvements to the Yahoo Development Network, Web-service capabilities and advertiser opportunities. The moves could be seen as an attempt to show Yahoo’s value is greater than the US$40 billion acquisition bid of the Redmond... (Read More)

Oct 19th, 2008 - According to the Sunday Times today, anyone in the UK who wants to buy a mobile phone will need to produce a valid passport as a form of ID soon. The story is wrapped around the planned introduction of a national database to help combat crime and terrorism. The proposed database would contain... (Read More)

Jun 21st, 2008 - Multiple arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities in Ruby have been revealed by the Apple Product Security team which could lead to Denial of Service attacks. A total of five vulnerabilities have been reported, with versions impacted being: 1.8.4 and all prior versions 1.8.5-p230 and all prior... (Read More)

Sep 26th, 2007 - IBM researchers have unveiled prototype 3D visualisation software that will enable doctors to interact with their medical data in pretty much the same way they interact with their patients. The technology, known as the Anatomic and Symbolic Mapper Engine (ASME), uses an avatar representation of the... (Read More)

Sep 10th, 2007 - Qualcomm is best known for two things: making mobile phone chips and owning the once hugely popular Eudora email client software. Or perhaps I should say once owning the once hugely popular Eudora email client software as Qualcomm stopped selling it back in May and handed over the codebase to the... (Read More)

Jul 2nd, 2007 - A British company claims to have developed software which can spot pedophiles online and catch them in the act of ‘grooming’ children in chat rooms and IM sessions. Just as handwriting and voice analysis is used by law enforcement agencies the world over in order to accurately determine age, so... (Read More)

Sep 23rd, 2006 - Larry Sanger may have co-founded Wikipedia, and I say ‘may’ as Jimmy Wales seems to dispute this somewhat and prefers to refer to Sanger as merely an employee, but there is no doubt that it was Larry who came up with the name Wikipedia. A great name, it has to be said, but perhaps we all only have... (Read More)

Sep 14th, 2008 - One of the year’s biggest disappointments has to be Seagate Teachnology. The high-tech heavyweight is taking on so much water that barnacles are starting to grow on its bottom line. Hey . . . at least something is growing on Seagate’s bottom line. Before I get into Seagate’s woes, I realize... (Read More)

Aug 6th, 2008 - A good friend of mine thinks that data technology access kingpin Qualcomm can be to the wireless market in the 2010’s what Microsoft was to software in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Granted, Qualcomm is smack in the sweet spot – the premier provider of high-speed data access products and services at a... (Read More)

Jul 16th, 2008 - Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is between a rock and a hard place. Bernanke, who spends another day in front of a congressional panel defending his handling of the Fed during a tough economic period, is stuck with a Hobson’s choice. Lower interest rates to help the economy but risk... (Read More)

Aug 14th, 2008 - According to ChannelWeb a federal judge sitting in the US Court of Appeals has ruled that open source software licenses are legal under copyright law. This is a complete u-turn on a previous ruling which had thrown the not so small matter of open source licensing into something of a legal quagmire.... (Read More)

Aug 8th, 2008 - It has been a long time coming, but Microsoft has finally announced the release to manufacturing of SQL Server 2008. "Microsoft developed this release of SQL Server with the customer in mind," said Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of the Data and Storage Platform Division at Microsoft. "SQL... (Read More)

Feb 6th, 2008 - According to HP an incredible 92% of top IT decision makers in Europe do not feel that their organisation is exploiting the competitive advantages offered by information management. In fact, respondents who took part in the 2008 Pressure Point Index survey were pretty dissatisfied overall with both... (Read More)

Nov 24th, 2007 - The new version of the GNU Affero General Public License has been published by the Free Software Foundation, based upon the existing GNU GPLv3 license but with one important difference: support for on-demand software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. By publishing this license, the FSF aims to... (Read More)

May 20th, 2008 - I went to the demonstrations of the latest satellite navigation system from TomTom, and guess what - there's very little new to speak of in any of the devices. Yes, some of them have a wider screen than before and indeed I agree the new mounts for the dashboard are more elegant than the crane-like... (Read More)