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Microsoft dates, prices Office 2008 for Mac Microsoft has named the date on which Mac OS X users can get their hands on the latest version of its Office suite. From big iron to white boxes, Nationwide goes virtualFrom big iron to white boxes, Nationwide goes virtual While many IT shops see virtualization as a question of adopting EMC's VMware on servers running Windows or Linux, Nationwide Insurance has adopted the technology for both x86-based and mainframe-hosted servers. After all, notes Buzz Woeckener, the company's zLinux/Unix server manager, virtualization was invented for mainframes.  September 24, 3:00 a.m. PDT On the road to the virtual desktop Click ‘n’ run. It seems like such a simple concept. Surf up to a Web page, select the desired application from a list, and click. Voila! Microsoft Word appears on your desktop. Or Excel, or Adobe Photoshop… you name it. September 24, 3:00 a.m. PDT Herd behavior demonstrated at Demo "Whatever happened to working alone?” September 24, 3:00 a.m. PDT Credit Suisse plans virtualization a massive scale With 20,000 servers to manage, financial services powerhouse Credit Suisse had a long list of reasons to consider server virtualization: reducing the number of physical servers to manage, cutting power needs, improving software provisioning time, and deferring expensive datacenter buildouts. But it also needed a clear set of guidelines to determine when to virtualize, plus a clear set of procedures for managing a virtualization initiative. September 24, 3:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft teases with Office 2008 for Mac features Microsoft's Mac Business Unit has begun revealing features of its forthcoming Office 2008 for Mac. September 6, 7:25 a.m. PDT Does Mac OS X suck? Paul Venezia bamboozled me into buying a MacBook Pro back in January, and I've been on it semi-daily ever since. And yeah, overall, I've been pretty happy. Of course, the only reason I was willing to buy one at all was because Parallels made it so easy to run Windows. But while my initial usage ratio was 85 percent Parallels, 15 percent OS X, over the last six months, that's changed dramatically to 45 percent Parallels, 55 percent OS X. Yup, the Orchard does slowly assimilate you. August 29, 3:00 a.m. PDT Apple plans iMac desktop upgrade Apple plans to upgrade its iMac desktop PC line on Tuesday with a flashier design and thinner keyboard, according to information published initially on the Web site AppleInsider and repeated widely on other blogs. Apple did not return calls for comment, but has already announced that it will hold a news conference that day at its Cupertino, California, headquarters. August 6, 9:48 a.m. PDT Microsoft delays Mac Office 2008 Microsoft on Thursday pushed back the release date of Office 2008 for Mac until January, a delay from an earlier promise to deliver the new suite this year. August 2, 9:56 a.m. PDT Apple's Mac sales rise, iPhone to ship in Europe, Asia Apple on Wednesday announced a profit of $818 million for its fiscal third quarter, which ended June 30, 2007. The company reported earnings of $5.41 billion for the quarter, with record-high Mac sales for the quarter. July 26, 6:48 a.m. PDT Windows Mobile needs fixing, fast Last week's big Redmond stories were the release of Dynamics Live CRM and the announcement that Windows Server 2008 would come out in February of next year along with the next revs of SQL Server and Visual Studio. The week prior it was how Apple iPhone seemed a little worm-ridden when compared even to Windows Mobile. And naturally, at the time, I agreed. No one's open-mouthed with surprise, but even so, I feel it's important to point out that I don't think the iPhone is total bullocks. And nothing has served to bring that out more than Microsoft's release of Dynamics Live. July 18, 3:00 a.m. PDT Anonymous researcher boasts of building Mac worm An anonymous security researcher claimed this weekend to have created a worm that exploits a vulnerability in the Mac OS X operating system which Apple missed in a May round of patches. July 17, 7:58 a.m. PDT iPhone: The $1,975 iPod Every living thing knows about iPhone. Apple and AT&T saw to that in their unprecedented campaign to prime demand for a mobile device that has been dubbed "revolutionary" and "game changing." After nine days doing nothing but living, breathing, and dissecting a 4GB iPhone, I am captivated by it. I'd challenge any gadget hound to find a more satisfying, status-elevating way to blow half a grand. July 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT iPhone delivers more misses than hits Apple and AT&T deliver plenty of great features in the iPhone, but the list of shortcomings is too extensive to ignore. The following is a list of pros and cons for the iPhone I observed in my extensive testing of the device (see also InfoWorld's iPhone Test Center Review). July 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT iPhone: Proceed with caution It's not that I don't like the iPhone's captivating look or slick UI. In fact, I think the iPhone comes closer than most to being the ideal gadget to take with you on the road. What stops me from buying one is that it lacks one vital feature in its remarkable bag of tricks: an Internet connection faster than EDGE (Enhanced Data GSM Environment). July 6, 3:00 a.m. PDT A developer's-eye view of Leopard, part III Mac users have high expectations. A newcomer to the platform quickly discovers that all Mac applications share consistent appearance and behavior, are incomparably fast, and come with "Wouldn't it be great if I could …?" user interface experiments that tend to just work. June 19, 3:00 a.m. PDT A developer's-eye view of Leopard, part II Apple has always been pulled in different directions by factions of its user and developer communities. Set-in-their-ways Mac developers whose experience predates OS X have a predilection for the C language, legacy Carbon function libraries, and esoteric development tools in the tradition of Macintosh Programmer's Workshop and CodeWarrior. Meanwhile, Apple's UNIX developers and emigrants from Linux go for C and C++ for native code and Python, Perl, and Ruby for dynamic apps, and demand a command line toolset and source code portability so that they can assemble the tools they prefer. And then there are those doing Java client development and programmers writing AppleScript programs who bring their own expectations to tools. June 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT A developer's-eye view of Leopard, part I Steve Jobs had a lot of fun at Microsoft's expense over Redmond's difficulties shipping the operating systems that have become Vista and Windows Server 2008. So with Vista shipping by default on new PCs and Windows Server 2008 in a publicly downloadable beta, Apple should be catching hell from the press for making Leopard the last to arrive. June 12, 3:00 a.m. PDT Parallels for Mac cozies up to Vista On the heels of Apple's launch of the Intel Mac, a company called Parallels captured the spotlight with an eponymous product that does for Mac OS X what VMware Workstation did for the Windows and Linux world -- full-blown hardware virtualization in a workstation package running natively on the Mac OS. Parallels allowed less-than-satisfied Windows users to jump to the Mac and to take their Windows applications with them. Windows-only applications and games were no longer a sticking point. June 11, 3:00 a.m. PDT Parallels for Mac now plays 3-D graphics Parallels is upgrading its desktop virtualization software for running Windows on a Mac computer, adding, among other things, 3-D graphics capability. June 8, 6:33 a.m. PDT Apple fixes 17 Mac OS X flaws Apple on Thursday unveiled the year's fifth major security update for Mac OS X to patch 17 vulnerabilities, but fewer than one-third of them could lead to hackers injecting their own code into a compromised system. May 25, 8:04 a.m. PDT Analyst: Apple to demo new MacBook Pros at WWDC, but no iPhone Apple will show off new MacBook Pro notebooks along with a full demonstration of the next operating system, Mac OS X 10.5 (a.k.a. Leopard), at next month's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), a Wall Street analyst predicted Wednesday. May 24, 9:21 a.m. PDT Can G.ho.st scare Microsoft? Somehow, the fact that startup G.ho.st has its headquarters in Jerusalem is fitting. After all, it wasn't far from the ancient city that the biblical hero David squared off against Goliath. And, in a sense, that is the tiny company and its G.ho.st (Global Hosted Operating System), is intent on doing with the giant of the operating system business: Microsoft. May 6, 3:00 a.m. PDT Apple II turns 30 The news out of Cupertino, California, was mostly dour last week, as Apple Inc. announced that it was delaying the delivery of the next version of its OS X operating system by four months so that it could complete work on the iPhone cell phone. April 16, 3:00 a.m. PDT Mac sense and nonsense A couple of columns ago, I introduced you to a friend and lifelong professional Windows user who agreed to let me observe and document her trial run at switching to the Mac. I set her up with a can’t-lose bargain: She would swap her desktop Windows PC for a Core 2 Duo MacBook running OS X Tiger but retain her PC as a Parallels Desktop virtual machine. To switch or not to switch is entirely her decision to make; I’m just watching. March 14, 3:00 a.m. PST Rivals launch dueling virtualization products Two makers of virtualization software for running the Windows operating system on Apple's computers have issued dueling upgrades this week. March 2, 4:35 a.m. PST One PC switcher’s tale By my calculations, based on Steve Jobs’ claim that half of all Macs are sold to first-time buyers, roughly 9,000 people switch to the Mac every day. They’re buying new iMacs, MacBooks, MacBook Pros and Mac Pros, most of which come in at sticker prices of $1,200 and up, plus add-ons. With OS X Leopard and iPhone hitting in June, I expect all hell and hallelujah to knock over those fence-sitting switchers. I’m looking forward to that. February 28, 3:00 a.m. PST The smart business of diversity Carly Fiorina served as CEO of Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005, the first woman to run a Fortune 20 company. After she was ousted, along with a $21 million exit package, Fiorina did what a lot of us would do if we had millions of dollars in the bank and some time on our hands: She wrote a book. In Tough Choices, published in October, Fiorina talks about rising to the top of a male-dominated culture. Fiorina spoke with InfoWorld correspondent Carmen Nobel for our upcoming feature on the issues women face in IT. January 22, 3:00 a.m. PST 2006 Year in Reviews: Platforms Novell’s Suse Linux 10 was the landmark operating system launch of the year, giving us a bigger and badder Linux server and a startlingly smooth Linux desktop. We also got good looks at Microsoft Vista and Windows Longhorn betas, and at BEA’s venerable WebLogic 9.1. December 18, 3:00 a.m. PST Hacker project puts spotlight back on Mac security The security of Apple Computer's wireless drivers is under scrutiny again, thanks to a new hacker project. November 2, 4:36 a.m. PST Why isn't China biting Apples? Hewlett-Packard and its Watergate re-enactment now own the tech scandal headlines, but during the summer our attention focused on other alleged malfeasance, by the company with the normally shiny image: Apple Computer. September 27, 5:17 a.m. PDT An Apple for the enterprise? Like it or not, buyers of x86 servers, clients, and workstations face a major platform shift as the 32-bit CPUs, operating systems, and applications slowly fade into history. That historic migration will have dramatic impact. After all, 64-bit computing revolutionized RISC-based UNIX systems, allowing them to step into roles dominated by mainframes and minicomputers. Something similar is sure to occur with PC servers as they muscle up with the huge horsepower and memory elbow room inherent in 64-bit computing. September 22, 3:00 a.m. PDT Leopard leaps in Apple is promising a fast turnaround for the next major release of OS X. Version 10.5, dubbed Leopard, should hit the streets in spring 2007. Beyond such front-end improvements as improved search, chat, and application linking, a number of under-the-hood enhancements are of special note. September 22, 3:00 a.m. PDT Mac Pro: Woodcrest goes to work Apple’s $2,499 Mac Pro has little in common with other two-socket Woodcrest systems, apart from the fact that it has the same pair of CPUs and the same chip set. September 22, 3:00 a.m. PDT Mac dreamers get a chance to put code to work Ever had a good idea for Mac software? Even if you aren't a developer, your chance to see it developed and to make money from it has arrived. August 22, 6:05 a.m. PDT Apple eyes the enterprise at WWDC Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference (WWDC) is no Mac pep rally. It’s a gathering of geeks ready for a deep dive into a pool of technologies. But WWDC also has a tradition of new product intros, and last week was no exception, with two major hardware offerings and a tantalizing look at Mac OS X 10.5, code-named Leopard. August 11, 11:45 a.m. PDT Forget about open source at Apple We all cheered when Apple began experimenting with community-driven, open source development for its flagship operating system, Mac OS X. But if those experiments are now drawing to a close, should anyone really be surprised? July 31, 3:00 a.m. PDT Windows apps cross over to the Mac Owners of Intel-based Macintosh computers are still waiting for versions of many of their favorite applications that are built for the new hardware. Although Apple's code translation technology is a marvel, it's no substitute for software that runs natively on the x86 platform. But Mac owners will soon have a new source of professional-grade, commercial software for their beloved machines. The catch is that the software was meant to run on Windows. July 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT Apple releases Mac OS X 10.4.7 Apple updated Mac OS X 10.4.7 on Tuesday, addressing several issues with the operating system. Separate updates were released for PowerPC and Intel versions of Mac OS X. June 28, 6:26 a.m. PDT Wall Street Beat: Apple buzz renewed Market buzz around Apple Computer sounded again this week, as better news about chip companies helped break a losing streak on several exchanges. June 16, 4:43 a.m. PDT Parallels Desktop for Mac available now The final release version of Parallels Desktop for Mac is available now. June 15, 8:35 a.m. PDT Imagining a day without Microsoft Did you ever hear the warning, “be careful what you wish for, it might come true?” Well, because Microsoft is the company most people love to hate, I decided to ask a cross section of industry cognoscenti this simple question: What would happen if Microsoft and all of its technology disappeared tomorrow? May 23, 3:00 a.m. PDT The slippery slope of open source If you work with open source software, you’ve been to the place I’ll describe in this column more times than you care to count. It always starts innocently enough. In my case, I needed to re-create a Linux-based development environment on my Apple PowerBook. The essential ingredients were Apache, Berkeley DB, mod_python, and libxml2. Pretty standard stuff, but I’d never assembled all the pieces on Mac OS X. April 26, 3:00 a.m. PDT Photoshop coming in Universal Binary A version of Adobe Systems' flagship Photoshop software that will run on Mac computers based on either the legacy PowerPC or new Intel platform will be available in the first half of next year, the company's CEO said Friday. April 21, 4:44 a.m. PDT Apple shakes its Boot; Sony's meager loot Editor's note: The management would like to announce that the next major rev of Notes From the Field (to be called A Vista From the Pasture) will not be ready for publication later this year as scheduled. However, future issues of InfoWorld will sport a “Cringely Capable” sticker, so that when it becomes available, readers may be able to install it into the magazine or Web site. In the interim, we bring you the more of the usual crapola. April 14, 3:00 a.m. PDT Update: Apple puts Windows XP on the Mac Apple Computer has released beta software that lets Mac users run Microsoft's Windows XP operating system on Intel-based Macintosh computers, it announced Wednesday. April 5, 9:14 a.m. PDT Has InfoWorld gone Mac crazy? To say that Tom Yager has a thing for Apple is like saying Homer Simpson likes donuts. Yes, InfoWorld’s chief technologist is a devotee. Yet it’s “not a religious issue,” Yager insists. It’s just that Apple “stands as an example of how to do many things right.” April 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Letters to the Editor Here’s the letter that sparked the controversy: April 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT MacOS X worm wiggles its way into wild A worm that affects computers running Apple Computer's MacOS X operating system is circulating on the Internet, according to antivirus software makers. February 17, 4:04 a.m. PST Microsoft tries to slip Windows XP SP3 delay under our noses It’s been a bang-up year already for Microsoft. Hot on the heels of its WMF disaster, Redmond announced that other vulnerabilities existed in Outlook and Exchange. (The company is working on those.) Then another spat erupted about a supposed wireless flaw in Microsoft’s Windows 2000 and Windows XP OSes. This one’s been going on for a week now, and I’m a mite ticked, not only because it’s not actually a flaw, but also because the flap about it seems to be masking a real flaw: the one in Microsoft’s software release schedule. The company just announced its delay of the Service Pack 3 release until 2007, as much as a year later than expected. January 19, 3:00 a.m. PST Microsoft to end Mac support in Windows Media? Despite the new five-year deal between Apple and Microsoft, it appears at least one Redmond product team is being reshuffled -- the Windows Media for Mac mob. January 13, 5:58 a.m. PST Intel Macs give users more OS choice The idea of running Windows on the Apple Computer hardware just got a lot more appealing with the introduction of Macs built on Intel processors. But don't expect the Cupertino, California, company, to be too keen on its users running Windows on the new machines. January 13, 4:35 a.m. PST Update: New Apple notebook and iMac unveiled Apple Computer's Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs introduced a new notebook and an iMac computer that use Intel's latest processor on Tuesday, six months ahead of the schedule outlined by Apple last year. January 11, 4:32 a.m. PST Forrester index finds US tech sector healthy for now The U.S. technology industry has recovered from a recession of 2001 and 2002 and is about as healthy as it's been in three years, according to a new tech sector economic index released Monday. December 12, 9:49 a.m. PST Losing its cool, Apple iPod gets ROI; plus auto industry avoids RFID The Diffusion Group is out with a study hinting that the iPod is no longer cool. That’s right, with more than 30 million iPods on the streets, it seems, the hip factor is wearing off. So all you smug Apple store employees can just stop wearing black right now, because your little cool game is over. November 11, 3:00 a.m. PST Piracy stings developers most There was a time when I railed against the use of rumors as sources for news in respected trade publications. Now I pine for those more innocent days. Blogs are considered news sources now, a practice that, at its worst, should yield what one expects from lazy journalists. But I am shocked to see the media’s race to adapt from blogs the most detailed instructions for pirating Apple’s OS X for Intel and get them to readers first. October 19, 3:00 a.m. PDT Is a Web-based office suite on the way? The Google/Sun press conference on Oct. 3, which announced a deal to jointly “promote and distribute software technologies,” is generating a great deal of speculation. October 11, 3:00 a.m. PDT Wall Street Beat: IT earnings season off to heady start Technology bellwethers Apple Computer and Advanced Micro Devices got earnings season off to an exuberant start for the high-tech sector this week. Excellent results helped boost the Nasdaq Composite Index, weighted heavily with IT companies, to make Thursday the sixth day in a row that it closed up, and the fifth consecutive day that it closed at its highest level in six months. July 14, 4:16 p.m. PDT Update: Apple sets company records for revenue, income in Q3 The phenomenal growth of Apple Computer's iPod music player was joined by strong growth in Mac shipments during the company's third quarter, leading Apple to the best financial quarter in its history, it announced Wednesday. July 13, 4:45 p.m. PDT Open source on Windows -- an unholy alliance? I have a confession to make. Sometimes, when I’m trying out an unfamiliar open source component, I cheat. Even if the software I’m working on will deploy to Linux, I’ll sometimes develop it on Windows first. July 6, 5:00 a.m. PDT Client-facing Java perks up Although Java has earned a reputation for solid back-end performance, its history as a client-facing platform has been troubled. When Java first shipped in 1995, programmers could create GUI components with the AWT (Abstract Windowing Toolkit). This package attempted -- with only modest success -- to provide a cross-platform set of controls and widgets. But programs that relied on the AWT were unstable, barely portable, and not terribly attractive. June 27, 5:00 a.m. PDT Intel at Apple's core The recent news about Apple adopting Intel chips for its hardware elicited roughly the same amount of excitement in me as washing a pile of dirty laundry -- that is to say, not much. My main reaction was this: Since when did Apple people care so much about CPUs? June 14, 5:00 a.m. PDT Apple hooks up with Intel, social nets kiss and tell So I looked up my new friend at that social-networking firm. She's got quite an impressive set of connections. It seems we're each three degrees away from Paris Hilton and Pee-wee Herman. I started by sending her a few e-mails, and now we're exchanging instant messages. This summer could prove more interesting than I'd originally thought. June 10, 5:00 a.m. PDT Apple pushes out big security fix Apple Computer has fixed a number of security holes in Mac OS X, some of which could allow remote attackers to take over a system. June 9, 7:20 a.m. PDT Are Tiger's features compelling enough? Last week i upgraded to the 10.4 (“tiger”) version of Mac OS X, and I’ve been getting acquainted with its new features. The headline attractions are Spotlight (for search), Dashboard (for lightweight applications), and Automator (for scripting). Although I’m happy to have them, none seems likely to make me wildly more productive. That’s not entirely Apple’s fault, though. As the boundaries between desktop systems and the network continue to blur, it gets harder to deliver value purely in the form of OS or application upgrades. June 8, 5:00 a.m. PDT Apple faithful learning to like oranges When is a chip not just a chip? When Apple Computer is involved. June 7, 4:55 a.m. PDT Reports: Apple to switch to Intel chips June 6, 4:38 a.m. PDT Computex: Inspired by Apple June 3, 5:20 a.m. PDT Tiger burns bright Users usually don’t expect much from OSes. They’re the foundation for prefabricated or build-it-yourself solutions, but none is a rich solution, a self-contained platform out of the box. If you want a complete productivity platform, you can nickel and dime your way there with Windows, hammer and saw your way there with Linux … or hit the ground running with OS X. June 3, 5:00 a.m. PDT WSJ claims Apple to use Intel chips A new report that claims Apple may choose to use Intel processors has appeared in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). May 23, 5:52 a.m. PDT Apple puts users on a need-to-have basis Considering how bright and enthusiastic Apple’s engineers and product managers are, I know each day brings dozens of new ideas to the conference table. Ultimately, Apple turns thumbs down on 995 out of 1,000 of those ideas. Apple could easily stuff in the box with every copy of OS X four supplemental DVDs containing all the brilliant ideas its engineers have dreamed up and all the open source projects advanced by groups within the company. It could fill the unoccupied 2GB of the OS X client DVD with optional goodies. But it doesn’t. The company famous for the pretty computers and the borderline sinful Aqua GUI doesn't actually show off. It gives users only what they absolutely need. Seriously. April 27, 5:00 a.m. PDT Under Mac attack If I learned anything from the feedback for my last column, it's that Mac loyalists remain a passionate bunch. The e-mails I received had my head spinning faster than Fast User Switching in OS X. Clearly, the response would have been kinder if I had just been unmasked as a serial killer. I received generous helpings of "idiot" and "dolt" sprinkled with a "callous ineptitude" here and there -- all because I wrote about my warning to a new salesperson that he wasn't going to get support for being the Lone Ranger of Macs in his PC-only department. March 29, 6:00 a.m. PST Apple patches security flaws Apple Computer has patched nine security flaws in a new update for its Mac OS X operating system, including some that could allow an attacker to take over a system, and a phishing flaw in Safari that was recently fixed in the Mozilla Firefox browser. March 24, 9:04 a.m. PST Into the Mac trap For two years running, Steve Jobs spent more time during his Macworld Expo keynote talking up luxury car iPod sockets than he did his own server product line. If Apple won’t bother pitching Xserve and Xserve RAID to the value-conscious audience, then what’s up with the BMW, Mercedes, and Ferrari logos? January 28, 3:00 p.m. PST Welcome to the Mac, Oracle Like you, I make my living in technology. And like you, I don’t make capricious career choices. The decision I made about two years ago to focus my IT operations, my research, and a good deal of my editorial output on the Mac platform will shape the rest of my working life. January 21, 3:00 p.m. PST Apple gets suite, AIP admits defeat It’s been a week since I returned from Vegas, and I’m still recovering from my CES hangover. That ear-splitting duet between Intel’s Craig Barrett and Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler may have done me in. Or maybe I spent too much time at the convention center’s oxygen bar. I knew it was a bad idea to try the one labeled Bouncer’s Armpit. January 14, 3:00 p.m. PST Update: Apple ups the ante with Mac mini, iPod, and Xsan A year ago, Apple CEO Steve Jobs cut Pixar's ties with Disney, opting to handle its own marketing and distribution. With that move, the animation shop that made a name for itself with a hopping lamp became its own studio, in control of everything from the rendered frame, to the prints shipped to theatres, to the timing and pricing of its DVDs. January 13, 6:33 a.m. PST Obligatory predictions for 2005 After I managed to break tradition and get my yuks with last week's column, the Society for Underpaid Columnists, Kooks, and Simpletons called. The members demanded a 2005 predictions installment from yours truly, or they'd take apart my Ducati and run it through a wood chipper. So I'm breaking out my semi-imaginary girlfriend's tarot deck and a bottle of Cuervo Gold and getting to work. January 7, 3:00 p.m. PST Try as I might, I can’t wreck a Mac The press and a skeptical market have lined up one flaming hoop after another to ensure that Apple always has one more thing to do before it’s taken seriously. Financial publications have finally had their epiphanies, and I hope the Mac-shy see it as a welcome wagon. January 7, 3:00 p.m. PST Emulation software makes something out of nothing Virtualization solutions such as VMware ESX Server use emulation technologies to trick operating systems into seeing hardware that isn't there. But emulation is also used as a stand-alone technology across a broad range of industries. AMD shipped an emulator to get developers working on Opteron/Athlon 64 technology well in advance of the chip's availability. Palmsource, Nokia, and Microsoft bundle device emulators with their mobile development environments, not only to speed development but also to allow coders to validate their software on mobile platforms they don't own. Intel and Transmeta rely on low-level emulation to run 32-bit x86 software on VLIW (very long instruction word) processors. November 5, 3:00 p.m. PST My PowerBook odyssey About a year ago, I enthusiastically switched to OS X running on a PowerBook laptop. Since then I’ve experienced the ups and downs of managing enterprise IT from a PowerBook. As a personal device, my PowerBook has become the center of my digital life in a way that my Windows laptop never did, mainly because I love the look and feel. Yet running OS X in a typical enterprise is not problem-free. A positive experience, yes, but not perfect. October 1, 3:00 p.m. PDT Tiger debut, ZoneAlarm snafu My whining about what to do now that Comdex is kaput prompted many helpful hints from the Cringe Crew. Readers suggested I attend Burning Man (sorry, but I’m too old), hit Gnomedex 4 (too tall), or take my chances at the craps table (too broke). Then again, I might adopt one reader’s suggestion to drive the strip with a Wi-Fi scanner, warchalking casinos. I’ve always wondered what it feels like to get your legs broken. July 9, 3:00 p.m. PDT The mighty Mac The quiet time forced upon us by the recession gave us all an opportunity to do some window shopping -- to consider technology that we weren’t prepared to buy and to ponder the new solutions we could craft with it. That put new client and server platforms on IT’s radar. I’ll examine these in a series of columns that will include Opteron, OS X Server, Solaris 10, and 64-bit Windows. The timing of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference makes the Mac client platform a good place to start. July 2, 3:00 p.m. PDT Apple previews Mac OS X 'Tiger,' Tiger Server SAN FRANCISCO -- Apple Computer Inc. is giving attendees of this week's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2004 in San Francisco, a first look at the next major revision to Mac OS X v10.4, known by its code-name "Tiger." Version 10.4 is the forthcoming release of the company's operating system that is expected to be released some time in the first half of 2005, and it touts more than 150 new features, according to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who took the wraps off the software at a keynote address on Monday morning. June 29, 6:00 a.m. PDT The burden of platform diversity Working in IT involves a certain bit of idealism, which can be either a positive or negative force. When idealism gets out of control, it frequently obscures the practical considerations that make corporate IT work. June 25, 3:00 p.m. PDT Effective IT calls for intelligent urgency If you’ve been CTO at the same company for a few years, things ought to be running fairly smoothly. All major systems should be stable, and overall uptime should be solid. Your sys admins’ pagers and cell phones should be mostly silent through the night. You’ve probably dispensed with what I call “wasted urgency” in your IT organization — the frenetic activity so often wrongly conflated with actual forward movement toward problem solving. June 18, 3:00 p.m. PDT Apple security update addresses latest issues Apple Computer Inc. on Monday issued a security update for Mac OS X addressing a number of issues found in the operating system. Security Update 2004-06-07 delivers a number of security enhancements and is recommended for all Macintosh users, according to Apple. The update includes the following components: DiskImages; LaunchServices; Safari; and Terminal. June 8, 4:45 a.m. PDT Apple fig-leaf security patch causes dismay A critical patch for Mac OS X issued on Friday leaves Mac users as vulnerable to attacks as they were before the fix, according to a security company. May 24, 7:09 a.m. PDT > Platforms > Operating systems |
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