With just a few clicks you, too, can create a cloud computing environment. But if you’re like a lot of organizations, you may not know what to do with it after that.

The latest version of Ubuntu Server (9.10) includes the Ubunt...

As we plummet down into Gartner's "trough of disillusionment", the cloud skeptics are making their voices heard. Although my professional focus is at the forefront of the cloud storage wave, I can not disagree with the content of articles with sensational headlines like "Cloud Storage:...

Many IT managers would love to move some of their applications out of the enterprise data center and into the cloud. It's a chance to eliminate a whole litany of costs and headaches: in capital equipment, in power and cooling, in administration and maintenance. Instead, just pay as you...

Ok, so, here are my thoughts on Ulitzer... As a blogger, I focus on traffic and I spend quite a lot of time optimizing my SEO. Since the target audience of my articles is much greater than the reach of my blog, Ulitzer is actually helping me increase my content reach. Moreover, Ulitzer...

The round of applause that greeted the suggestion that Ken Cron be promoted from Interim CEO to full CEO of Computer Associates International (renamed as CA as one of the first action items by John Swainson) left a smile on the face of Chairman Lewis Ranieri at the company's annual sha...

Have you noticed how people that are neck deep in complexity almost always ask for a standardized solution? And they supposedly do this to regain oversight.

And in reverse; have you noticed how people that have everything neatly packed in small modular boxes almost always as...

Yesterday a friend of mine was asking me what I've been doing lately in my spare time. When I mentioned that I'd been doing a lot of messing around with Windows Azure, he was naturally curious. After explaining what Azure is, he asked me what the difference was between Windows Azure, a...

Jon has a point; Microsoft’s restricted (i.e., Express) editions are as free as the open source alternatives. This is undeniably true, since the purpose of many software vendor’s “Express” edition is to compete against open source on price. However, the difference is that with open sou...

You may wonder whether it’s too early to make the call given the lack of interoperability standards, security concerns, and common definition of cloud computing. Well, the IPTV space shares many of the same similarities – emerging technology, emerging standards, emerging adoption, var...

In some sense computer science is like geometry. When the art of measuring crop fields was under development by the ancient Mediterranean’s it was most naturally coined geometry – literally meaning measurement of the Earth. Geometry was slowly developed by many scholars to solve a wide...

"...I'll have one with everything." That is the possibly recognizable punch-line to an old joke about the Zen master ordering a hot dog. I am borrowing this as a theme for the on-going transformation of network architecture. Any successful design must follow the functionality requir...

CIOs and IT professionals can take a few pages from the Michael Jackson playbook. By looking at some of the best practices the King of Pop used to change the face of music, IT managers might find inspiration to change perceptions about IT in their organization.

It was once said back in the early ‘90s that “Client/server computing is a little like teenage sex – everyone talks about it, few actually do it, and even fewer do it right. Nevertheless, many people believe client/server computing is the next major step in the evolution of corporate i...

My brother (yes, it does run in the family) has a degree in computer science which, by most definitions, makes him a developer. That’s the focus of most computer science focused degree programs, much to the chagrin of the myriad other IT-focused specialties like networking, security, a...

Not that it makes too much difference in the short term, but in the long term this may mean that KVM, which is included directly in the Linux Kernel may very well become the de-facto choice for linux centric virtualization. What makes this even more important is lately it seems that Li...

In what is a big mistake, in my opinion, Microsoft has chosen to only support Suse Linux in Hyper-V. If they want to truly compete with VMware and other virtualization companies they are going to have to open this up. This does not mean you can not run other distros, however it will no...

In order to describe itself as an 'open source' company, need a company merely be 'a company that will help you make the switch to open source in your company' - or does it have to be one that lets users feely download, compile, and use the software in question? Where is the dividing l...

I work in Building 2 on the 4th floor of BEA's Corporate offices. I had moved into a new office, when I noticed a box of CDs on the filing cabinet near my office...

Red Hat's announcement last month that it was buying JBoss has been the hot topic for almost anyone involved with Open Source. It's too early to tell exactly what the ultimate outcome will be.

'Spending good money to get into other rapidly commoditizing businesses... seems a waste,' comments Stephen Walli in this commentary on Oracle's reported desire to deliver an entire stack of technology to customers by buying/creating a Linux distro.

'Linux is good at doing what other things already have done, but more cheaply - but can it do anything new?' That's the question asked by Steven Weber, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, in an article in The Economist this week - one of the least useful ...

Ubuntu Linux is a new experience for me. Having used only Red Hat's Fedora Core, I was anxious to try out the recently released Ubuntu 5.10 (available from Ubuntu's Website at www.ubuntu.com). I was not disappointed. After waiting approximately 45 minutes to download the 617 MB ISO fil...

Recent studies show Linux taking a large and growing share of the global data center market, as well as making incipient gains on the desktop. Traditional IT deployment, however, doesn't tell the whole Linux story - this open source OS is also making impressive inroads in less-visible ...

Human memory and Random Access Memory (RAM) share one thing in common: they are both very volatile. This basically means that once the power sources feeding the memories are terminated, the memories disappear forever (at least in the case of human short-term memory; more on that in a b...

Forgive me for being a Scott McNealy fan, but I really can't help it. Scott and the crew at Sun have done a great job over the years producing what I consider to be really good products. Scott has also provided much-needed entertainment in the form of some very quotable quotes (who was...

AJAX, LAMP, Virtualization, SaaS, Open Source, SANs, Web 2.0, Blog consolidation, InfoSec, BitTorrent, Googlecrash, Adobe, IE7, SOA, REST, Single Sign-On, SemWeb, iComm, Structured Blogging, VPMNs, VoIP Phones, Semantic Technologies, Ruby on Rails, spam/phishing, VoIP, and WiFi: welcom...

Don Rosenberg's review of Larry Rosen's book, Open Source Licensing, did double-duty as a platform for FUD about the GNU GPL. The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL for short) was not the first free software license, but was the first to embody the concept of 'copyleft': the requireme...

The defeat of the EU software patenting directive, writes Richard Stallman, only provides a breathing space, in which programmers and consumers should gather forces. This battle has implications far beyond the software field. Our years-long fight has shown how undemocratic the EU is. I...

The weather's still good and the housing prices continue to climb. But the dot-com crash was far more severe than any previous dip in Silicon Valley's fortunes. Will a region that often takes itself too seriously ever be able to have fun again?

The Apache Software Foundation is one of many open source software organizations shaking the business world all the way down to its proprietary software toes. Along with Linux, the Apache HTTP Server has long been the consummate example of the power and quality of open source software...

When you consider the way LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, or Python) has evolved, you could draw comparisons to a very low tech but effective method of collaboration: the farmers' cooperative. Individual farmers on their own lacked the means to collect, negotiate, store, and shi...

It's probably not likely that Itanium has much of a future unless Linux makes massive gains in market share over the next 5 years. 'If Intel truly believes in Itanium,' writes Paul Nowak, 'then they have to do away with Windows. Windows is not coming to Itanium. While killing off Windo...

Bill Gates probably did not want to speak in front of politicians, and even warned his audience that he needed to be careful. So let's not be terribly hard on him. But...

We're all familiar with the disruption and cost of moving. When I'm asked what it takes to motivate an organization to move to desktop Linux, my answer is simple, 'Migrating desktops is like moving to a new house. What would it take to get you to move your house or office tomorrow?' Th...

The Birkenstocks and beards where mothballed this year as the new guard entered LinuxWorld Expo in button-down shirts and ties and the occasional Brooks Brothers suit. This year's LinuxWorld was all about business or at least that's the message IDG, the conference producer, tried to co...

Organizations spend a lot of money on equipment, on personnel to manage the equipment and on infrastructure to insure that the tools to do a job are available and can be run by their employees error-free.

Please forgive me as I dust off a cliché from the 1990s business press - the Business Ecosystem - which, despite its overuse, really is a good concept that can be effective when appropriately applied. Dictionary.com defines an ecosystem as 'An ecological community, together with its en...

It's hard to believe that we have passed the 13th anniversary of Linus Torvald's humble introduction of 'just a hobby' Linux, first posted to the Web in October 1991. Torvald previewed the OS as a 'Minix-lookalike' and designed for the days when 'men were men and wrote their own device...

To start off the new year, several LWM editors have compiled a list of what they consider to be the best solutions of 2004 in their particular field of expertise.

Linux has changed the economics of how companies do business by shifting the OS and infrastructure models they use from more expensive, proprietary Unix-based systems to lower-cost, standards-based Linux platforms. This has dramatically reduced IT costs and enabled companies to acquire...