P. J. Connolly

The Guardian had an interesting article yesterday in which the author (or, at least, the subeditor who wrote the headline) speculated that PC sales have passed their peak. Quoting Gartner and IDC, it noted that year-on-year shipments for the first quarter worldwide were off by a few percentage points; Asia/Pacific and Latin America were the […]

Apple finally got around to responding to last month’s SSL certificate snafu on April 14, by issuing updates for its Safari browser, the Mac OS X operating system and the iOS mobile platform. Safari 5.0.5 and Mac OS X Security Update 2011-002 can be downloaded from Apple’s Software Update service, while the iOS updates (4.3.2 […]

When faced with an unfamiliar Web conferencing platform, even the most experienced PowerPoint ranger can be baffled by the seemingly limitless options and capabilities of the most advanced conferencing platforms. But with complexity comes cost, and there’s room in the market for a powerful, yet low-cost alternative to brand-name services such as Citrix’s GoToMeeting and […]

Ordinarily, business cares as much for civil liberties as my dog does for integral calculus; in most cases, personal freedoms are as relevant to making a buck as the slope of a curve is to what kind of pizza is coming up the steps. But there’s a hole in privacy law that affects corporate America […]

A few years ago, mashups were the bee’s knees of enterprise development, and when you look at what traditional business applications did and how they were built, the idea made perfect sense. The mashup concept was supposed to allow organizations to build on the last decade’s investment in service-oriented architectures, combine SOA-driven workflows with federated […]

It wasn’t that long ago that Apple courted the enterprise IT dollar with rack-mounted servers, solid and reliable RAID arrays, grid computing and storage networking. Today, that’s just a memory. Although Apple continues to maintain and support server software, such as Xgrid and Xsan, the hardware is history. But after the first-day sellout of this […]

I have met what seems like a few hundred field techs over the years I’ve spent in IT, and the one thing they all have in common is a desire for lighter, more portable diagnostic tools. Mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPad offer the potential to be an excellent platform for such use, […]

Anyone who’s ever been in a bar band will confirm that it’s usually better to be the second act, unless the opener turns out to be wildly popular with the first arrivals in the audience. That seems to hold true with mobile devices as well: if the early adopters create the right buzz, the second […]

Just because a business is small in headcount doesn’t mean that its needs don’t require enterprise-quality software. In many ways, a small business needs a reliable and easily supported platform for core business services far more than a sprawling multinational. At the very least, the need exists for something that’s both powerful and simple. Windows […]

LibreOffice 3.3 is as polished as one might expect in a project that, for all of its novelty, has many years of development work backing it up. Any outfit that’s looking for a solid toolset for users who don’t require a lot of handholding, or integration with Microsoft’s Office server applications, could do much worse […]