Data Warehouse Appliances? Me too!
Just as every presidential candidate this cycle is the candidate of Change, it seems that all the DBMS vendors offer the preferred data-warehouse appliance solution. That's the message I heard from appliance panelists at today's TDWI Washington DC chapter meeting. For a couple of them it was a real stretch, which in one case wasn't a bad thing. The net take-away is that we are seeing Change in the DBMS world, even if for the politicians that word is still only a promise.
WikiLeaks Wins Back Its Domain
A federal judge dissolves an injunction but a Swiss bank's litigation against the community-driven document sharing site will proceed.
Laying Waste To Your Enemies With Google Bombs
Wired has a How-To Wiki on its site that often has great little blurbs on how to get things done. Today's How-To idea? How to embarrass, frustrate, or annoy your enemies by sending them Google bombs. Is this valuable knowledge to share? Is bombing people on the Internet something mature professionals do? Or is it
How eBay Manages Its Data Centers
The company is a third of the way through a major three-year grid computing initiative and is hoping to move toward automatic service level management.
Aquantia Seeks To Make 10GBase-T Scale
Darwin would have liked our industry. Evolution is constant and predictable, and it's particularly so for Ethernet, from its original 10 Mbps incarnation to the current 10 Gbps version -- pricing, power consumption, and port density follow a similar trend line. But just because the evolution happens, doesn't mean that it's easy.
Hacking My PowerShot
Hardware hacking: it isn't just for those of us with soldering-iron skills anymore, as the hacks for the iPhone clearly show. I don't have an iPhone, but I do have a Canon PowerShot A560, and as it turns out, that's another device that can be hacked thanks to some firmware wizardry.
Microsoft Combined With Intel For A Vista Logo Disaster
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer got its hands on the Microsoft e-mails that are part of the lawsuit regarding Microsoft's ill-fated Vista Capable logo program. Earlier, I said Microsoft, OEMs, and retailers all deserved blame in the logo disaster, but these insider e-mails have changed my opinion on apportioning blame.
Vaporware Vendor Targets New Markets
You have to admire a technology company that can build a business around airborne water particles. FogScreen has done that, with an impressive customer list that includes Disney, Nokia, 20th Century Fox, Sony, and Microsoft. Now it's taking its act to Vegas.
BI Goes Mainstream at Procter &Gamble
Philip Bierhoff, Systems Manager at Procter & Gamble, spoke at last week's FASTforward conference about strategies to increase user adoption as business intelligence goes mainstream. P&G's Symphony project creates "decision cockpits": dashboards based on specific roles and corporate divisions, and including information ranging from traditional BI reports to documents to news...
Fight The Power: Greening Your Linux Systems
Linux has a lot of advantages as a desktop operating system. Power management, unfortunately, still is not one of them. But there are plenty of ways to make a Linux system less power-hungry -- and some of the most effective fixes are also some of the easiest.
SaaS vendor NetSuite Opens Platform To ISVs, VARs
In launching the NetSuite Business Operating System, the vendor is offering to host third-party software on its multi-tenant, on-demand architecture. As a result, ISVs and VARs can extend NetSuite's underlying capabilities to specific verticals.
Did Poor Data Governance Spark the Subprime Crisis?
The subprime lending crisis offer fresh evidence that we're in the bear-skins-and-stone-knives era of understanding risk and making good decisions based on data. That's one of the key points I heard yesterday at an IBM Data Governance Council meeting in New York... Current technologies are limited by a lack of best practices and standards and by the sheer scale and complexity of enterprises and financial markets...
Taking Google Sites For A Spin
After seeing the news this morning about the launch of Google Sites, I decided to take the new tools for a spin. I signed up, bought myself a domain name, and went to work at customizing it and setting up users. Just how easy is it?
Google Readies Google Health
The upcoming service is expected to look similar to Google News and provide links to profile data, medical contacts, health notices, and drug interaction warnings.
Firefox, Or Pigfoot?
One index of success for an open source project is how many other projects are derived from it -- or how many people have created alternate builds of the same project. Firefox's success has spawned a whole slew of community-compiled editions of the program, and this week I've been living with one of them, code-named "Pigfoot."
Those Other Ruby Web Frameworks
The Pragmatic Programmer has long advocated that it's good practice to learn at least one new programming language every year. If you're a web developer, it's at least as important to pick up a new framework from time to time.
Most Ruby developers tasked with building web applications are clearly working in Rails at this point. However, there are some great alternative fram
Where To Start With ILM
Last week I hosted an ILM (Information Life-cycle Management) video Web cast. One of the questions that came up was "Where do I start with ILM without much risk?" It's a good question.
Will Office Open XML Slam The Door On Accessibility?
Microsoft's bid to turn its Office Open XML (OOXML) format into an ISO standard is a bad idea for any number of reasons. One of those reasons, however, strikes me as especially troubling: If OOXML wins ISO approval, it could make life much harder for millions of disabled people who rely upon accessibility-enhancing tools and technologies.
Apple Set To Release iPhone Developer Kit
The set of software tools is expected to include a compiler and hooks to an operating system's application programming interfaces for connecting to a variety of services.
Dell Builds Out Web-Hosted Support Services
Among the services Dell plans to make available are patch management, anti-virus, anti-spam, online backup and recovery, asset discovery, asset tracking, e-mail continuity, e-mail archiving, and image management.
Why You Should Love Information Mess
David Weinberger, author of "Everything is Miscellaneous," believes we need to unlearn what we think that we know about the best ways to organize information... He looks at how many projects require a much greater degree of control as they increase in size, but contrasts that with the Web, which has growth only because of the lack of control. Control doesn't scale; we just thought that it did...
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