Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Over the weekend, the IT world was transformed. Chances are you didn’t notice. No, Vista SP1 wasn’t released, neither was XP SP3, nor the beta of Ubuntu 8.04. What did happen was that on Friday, March 14, the major Wall Street bank Bear Stearns collapsed. Bear Stearns has invested billions in two hedge funds that […]

Friends in business, enemies in the courtroom, Novell succeeded on March 17 in persuading the Supreme Court, over Microsoft’s objections, that its antitrust suit against Microsoft should go forward. While Microsoft and Novell have formed a strong technology and marketing partnership in the last 18 months, Novell has never given up its multibillion antitrust lawsuit […]

The future is today. When Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, Craig Mundie, looked into his crystal ball and predicted that parallel computing would be the next revolution in computing, he was quite correct. It’s just that he was looking into the past. Parallel computing has been here and changing the world for years. The […]

Red Hat’s next update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 5.2, with major upgrades to the desktop and virtualization, is ready for beta testing. If your business depends on RHEL, you’ll want to download this beta to get an idea what your servers are going to be working with in a few months. According to […]

Believe it or not, recently I’ve seen several Microsoft products-Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V virtualization-that I think are winners. But then, just when I think Microsoft might finally be getting its technology act together, it comes up with a complete disaster: Windows Home Server. I never liked Home Server because I couldn’t see a point […]

I have a confession to make. I love my iPod Touch. It’s simply the best way to listen to music on the go or to watch a film when I’m stuck on a long flight. What it hasn’t been, though, is a useful work tool. That was then. This is now. First, on Jan. 15, […]

Microsoft admitted on a technical blog on March 10 that Windows Home Server can corrupt data when used with a wide variety of common applications. According to the blog posting, Microsoft has been aware of the “data corruption issue” since “late December 2007.” Specifically, Microsoft states in its KnowledgeBase listing that on servers with more […]

The Software Freedom Law Center and High-Gain Antennas jointly announced March 6 that High-Gain will conform to the General Public License and that as a result the SFLC will dismiss its GPL lawsuit. The suit began when the developers of BusyBox, a set of embedded Unix utilities licensed under the GPLv2, asked High-Gain to provide […]

It’s time for another SJVN quiz. How many major companies are making a profit with direct sales of dedicated disk compression programs? How about dedicated Web servers? OK, what about Web browsers? The answers? Zero, zero, and one. Opera is hanging on with all its might. What do these examples have to do with VMware, […]

Anyone who has ever used an Apple iPhone loves it. Besides just being cooler than an iceberg, it’s actually a great smart phone. So, from the very beginning, iPhone users wanted, oh how they wanted, to be able to use their iPhones in the enterprise. I mean, a BlackBerry Pearl is pretty neat, but come […]