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Making the Cloud Conventional February 15, 2012 
Last week Oracle bought the HR SaaS company Taleo for $1.9 billion, which to me means it's time to do you-know-what to the fire and call in the dogs. This hunt is officially over and out. The hunt in question is for legitimacy and primacy of the SaaS and cloud computing model.
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Silicon Valley's Secret Sauce February 14, 2012 
Business strategists and government officials routinely visit Silicon Valley in hopes of learning how to emulate the area's wildly successful startup culture. Now, thanks to The Start-Up of You, a new book by LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman and entrepreneur Ben Casnocha, the curious can save themselves the plane ticket.
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Cache as Cache Can: New SSD Options Boost Performance February 14, 2012 
Last week saw a pair of announcements by major vendors that reflect the degree to which solid state disk or flash caching technologies are moving into the mainstream: 1) IBM announced several key enhancements to its latest XIV Gen3 solutions; and 2) EMC announced VFCache, a new server flash caching solution that increases throughput by 3X while reducing latency by 60 percent.
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Open APIs Are the New Open Source February 14, 2012 
We've seen the rise of open source software in the enterprise and also beyond the IT industry, but the real keys to openness and its advantages in today's technology world -- where efficient use of cloud computing and supporting services are paramount -- exist in open application programming interfaces, or APIs.
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Boycott Apple! Why Apple Is Screwed February 13, 2012 
Boy, if there were ever an indication that we're in the post-Steve Jobs years, it was last week when there was a major rally to hold Apple accountable for the poor working conditions at Foxconn in China. Now I'm all for accountability, but this would be like a European country holding a restaurant there accountable for the working conditions on U.S. fishing boats (and there was even a TV show on how bad that job can suck).
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The Day Canonical Pushed Kubuntu Out of the Nest February 13, 2012 
Linux fans have had a hard enough time watching the ongoing woes of Mandriva in recent months, so when the news hit last week that Kubuntu was under threat as well, it just felt like too much. "Today I bring the disappointing news that Canonical will no longer be funding my work on Kubuntu after 12.04," wrote developer Jonathan Riddell in
a message to Kubuntu developers.
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The Whens, Whats and Hows of iPad 3 February 11, 2012 
A Wall Street Journal report on Thursday gave Apple fans all the excuse they needed to indulge in some more speculation regarding the iPad 3 -- if that is its real name, and if whatever it is even exists. Apple's kind of tight-lipped about this stuff. At this moment in the tablet universe, it's hard to guess what kind of grand and monumental new features Apple would want to add to the iPad.
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Counting the Cloud's Blessings February 10, 2012 
It amazes me that there are still analyst reports and other industry studies questioning the value of today's cloud solutions. While there is no question that the return on investment will vary depending on a variety of factors, there is plenty of evidence that anyone who employs cloud solutions thoughtfully today can generate plenty of measurable and tangible business benefits.
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Customer Focus Is an All-Hands Exercise February 10, 2012 
Last week, after dropping off my Prius at the dealership for routine service -- as I've done regularly since I bought the car in 2007 -- I ambled over to the shuttle stop for a ride home. "Where you headed?" barked the driver, never raising his head from his newspaper. When I let him know where I was going, he immediately recognized me and his demeanor changed entirely.
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The Trouble With Mandriva February 09, 2012 
Now that Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Mint are enjoying such widespread attention and success, it's increasingly difficult to remember that not all distros are sharing in the same good fortune. Take Mandriva, for example. This venerable distro dates back to 1998, when it was born as Mandrake Linux, but its last few years have been tempestuous.
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The Talk of the Web February 08, 2012 
There's been a lot of activity on the Web and in our industry in the last week, and I thought it might be fun to try and tie at least some of it together. Much of it in one way or another involves Facebook -- or "FB," as the proposed ticker symbol suggests. It's widely assumed that its IPO will make the very earliest buyers a nice pile of profit, but what about those looking for a longer-term investment?
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GPS, Privacy and the Supreme Court February 08, 2012 
Privacy continues to be in the headlines. Companies and governments are garnering and analyzing information that they obtain through means some find questionable in unprecedented ways. Many readers use Google maps and rely on the Google Traffic tool to indicate whether traffic is moving or stalled, but the fact that Google uses Global Positioning System data from wireless devices is often a surprise.
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Facebook's IPO: What's Its Game? February 07, 2012 
As Facebook prepares for an IPO of its stock that may value the company at US$100 billion, it's important to know what sport it's in and if, like the Chicago Bulls with Jordan, dynasties can last. Michael Jordan was probably the best basketball player to play the game of hoop. He had a halo effect. But baseball just wasn't his sport at the level basketball was.
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AMD: Shift Happens February 06, 2012 
Last week was the coming-out party for AMD's new CEO, and his core message was that the market was undergoing a shift -- and when markets shift, leadership changes. His point was that Intel's leadership was at risk and that AMD was poised to take over that leadership. The nature of this change is massive, and I doubt we -- I mean any of us -- are fully aware of how much is changing.
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Will the Spark Tablet Ignite a FOSS Fire? February 06, 2012 
Now that webOS is making its merry way along the open road, there's no telling what tablets or other mobile devices it may inspire over the upcoming months. In the meantime, the Linux world is all abuzz over what promises to be the very first fully open tablet out there: the Spark, a device slated to ship in May from none other than the KDE Plasma Active community itself.
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Facebook to Investors: You Like What You See? February 04, 2012 
Facebook's finally decided to take a head-first dive into the mountain of cash it's been standing on for years. Following several days of heated rumors and years of speculation about when CEO Mark Zuckerberg was finally going to cash in his chips, the company filed an S-1 statement with the SEC, paving the way for an IPO as early as this May.
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