November 23, 2007

EXO Performance Network researchers claimed that after the series of benchmark tests it was concluded that Vista Service Pack 1 will not significantly improve the performance.

According to Exo-Blog:
"After extensive testing of both RTM and SP1-patched versions of Windows Vista, it seems clear that the hoped-for performance fixes that Microsoft has been hinting at never materialized. Vista SP1 is no faster than Vista from the RTM image."

November 23, 2007

The founder of MP3.com, Michael Robertson, came up with the solution how to make Windows software run on top of Linux. Robertson's solution is a new Linux distribution that will run all Windows applications as they would run on Windows 98, NT and XP. Robertson said that Windows users "have a big investment in Windows software and don't want to leave it behind. With Lindows OS, they won't have to. You can install the Windows software and it behaves exactly as it would on their Windows machine."

November 23, 2007

Dell announced last week that it would sell and support servers with Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Solaris operating system. This type of alliance between Dell and Sun will expand hardware choices for Solaris and the buyer.

October 16, 2006

Softpedia has published a review of the three most popular free anti-virus software packages for Windows. They include Avira's AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic 7, Grisoft's AVG Free Edition 7, and Avast! Home Edition 4.7. The review features dozens of screenshots depicting all the functions of each software package.

November 2, 2005

IBM DeveloperWorks has published a two-part article explaining how to build high performance Linux clusters. The discussion includes information about fail-over clusters, load-balancing clusters, and high-performance clusters. Among the technologies used are OSCAR, MPI, and PVM.

November 1, 2005

O'Reilly Network has published an article about preventing your IT career from imploding. Some of the recommendations include keeping up with the latest programming languages, keeping your mind sharp through bug fixing, communicating with non-techs, debating merits of new technologies with other technical people, and practicing system design even when your job is strictly support oriented.

August 26, 2005

According to an article at CNN/Money, India's dominance of offshore outsourcing may be coming to an and, as wages for IT and other professionals in India continue to climb. These conclusions come from a new research report by Gartner. The report also states that American and European corporations are starting to move their offshore outsourcing initiatives into lower cost countries like the Philippines, Malaysia, China, Vietnam, Hungary, Poland, and Russia.

August 17, 2005

WindowsDevCenter has published an in depth look at Microsoft's upcoming Windows Vista operating system. The article covers installation, new search functionality, virtual folders, Internet Explorer 7, Network Presentation, SafeDocs, User Account Protection, the Aero Glass interface, and a number of tips and tricks.

August 6, 2005

According to the most recent U.S. Department of Labor statistics and other surveys by staffing firms, the job market for technical professionals improved considerably in July.

August 6, 2005

Several news sites have published coverage of the OSCON 2005 conference. The O'Reilly Open Source Convention featured talks and presentations by many of the most important people in the Open Source community, including Larry Wall, Jonathan Schwartz, Guido van Rossum, Jeremy Zawodny, and many more.

June 23, 2005

An investigation by the UK newspaper The Sun has revealed that call center workers in India have been regularly selling bank customer account information to criminals engaged in ID theft. Companies engaged in offshore outsourcing of their customer support and IT infrastructure functions are now seeing the true cost of their outsourcing initiatives.

June 19, 2005

ONLamp has published an article showing how to use replication to perform a clean backup of a running MySQL database without having to bring the database server down. This is done by setting up a separate server as a replica and then once a day turning replication off to make a clean backup. After the backup, replication is restarted and replica automatically synchronizes with the master in order to obtain any changes. This article gives you the commands and scripts to get this working quickly and easily.

June 16, 2005

The LAMP open source development stack is steadily winning marketshare against Microsoft's .NET and Sun's Java programming suites. LAMP includes the Linux operating system, the Apache web server, the MySQL database and the scripting languages PHP, Perl or Python. In recent months, the LAMP suite has been making big inroads into large companies, due to a growing number of third-party software and service providers that are helping to accelerate the push of LAMP into corporate IT. A number of open source and commercial web applications like SugarCRM and Journyx are also being built atop the LAMP stack instead of atop .NET or Java. Microsoft is now also viewing LAMP as serious threat and is focusing on reducing the cost and complexity of using the .NET framework. As a response, Microsoft is working on a series of low cost products to compete directly with LAMP.

June 15, 2005

Informit.com has published a concise article detailing the major new features of Cisco's PIX Firewall 7.0. These features include: improved packet inspection engines for stateless protocols; flexible HTTP security policies; improved management of instant messaging, peer-to-peer, and tunneling applications; deep packet inspection for FTP, ESMTP, and 3G mobile traffic; Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) routing; firewall support for IPv6; transparent firewall mode; multiple context mode; new active-active and active-passive high availability modes; quality of service and priority queuing; use of access lists on inbound, outbound, or bi-directional traffic; modular policy framework; enhanced firewall management features; intrusion detection and protection using a database of attack signatures; new VPN functionality with stateful failover and many of the major features of the Cisco VPN 3000 concentrator; client-less WebVPN using SSL; and much more.

June 11, 2005

An article over at Informit.com explains how to use Linux Virtual Server (LVS) for load balancing web, e-mail, and streaming media traffic. Using LVS, you can scale your web site using a cluster of servers using network load balancing. LVS is the free alternative to paying tens of thousands of dollars for a commercial solution like Cisco's LocalDirector. Another advantage of LVS is that, unlike Microsoft network load balancing clusters, LVS allows you to add nodes running any operating system, not just Windows.

June 10, 2005

ONLamp.com has published an article explaining how to use the mod_security module in Apache to secure web services at the WSDL and SOAP level, without having to modify the web services code itself. Because attacks against web services can lead to information theft and remote command execution, it is important to get the security right, and this is one way to do that.

June 10, 2005

According to a new study by technology recruiting firm Robert Half, the U.S. information technology job market is improving steadily. The percentage of CIOs planning to add full-time IT staff in the third quarter is the highest it has been in three years. The poll was conducted with more than 1,400 CIOs from U.S. companies with more than 100 employees. Executives at the largest firms — those with more than 1,000 employees — and those in the Northeast plan to do most of the hiring, according to the survey. In addition, an article in the USA Today citing Labor Department statistics states that the number of workers who are quitting voluntarily and moving on to better jobs is nearing a four-year high, suggesting that the job market has improved significantly.

June 8, 2005

A new report on technology outsourcing has found that the number of customers satisfied with their offshoring providers has dropped from 79% to 62%. In addition, the number of customers prematurely terminating an outsourcing relationship has doubled to 51%. The report was based on surveys and in-depth interviews with 210 senior IT executives at Global 1000 companies and 242 senior executives at outsourcing service providers.

June 4, 2005

According to Computer Business Review, Citrix Systems' GoToMyPC division is looking at launching a GoToMyMac version of the service sometime soon. It would operate in the same way as GoToMyPC, but allow remote access to Macintosh computers, as well as support 24-bit color rendering.

June 4, 2005

HotHardware.com has published a review of the Compaq Presario V4000 notebook PC. Features of the Presario V4000 include an Intel 90nm Dothan Pentium-M processor with 2MB on-die L2 cache and a 533 MHz FSB, an Intel 915 chipset, up to 2 GB of RAM, Intel Graphic Media Accelerator 900, an internal 40GB, 60GB, 80GB, or 100GB Ultra ATA hard disk, a choice of CD/DVD burners, 10/100 Ethernet, Intel Wireless 2200BG (802.11 b/g) or Broadcom 802.11/b/g WiFi card, 56K v.92 fax modem, 15.4" WXGA TFT LCD 1280 x 800 pixel display, AC'97 2.3 audio, a weight starting at 6.45 pounds, 2 PCMCIA slots, an S-video out port, an SD/MS/MSPro/MMC/SM/XD memory card reader, four USB 2.0/1.1 ports, and one Firewire port.