The start of 2007 finds IT vendors at the top of the food chain squirming at being treated like the help. Vendor royalty such as Microsoft, Dell, and Intel, along with consultants who have insinuated themselves as IT's empowered insider, don't like i...
Steve Jobs delivered this year's Macworld Expo keynote to an over-capacity crowd. He boasted that the Mac's PowerPC-to-Intel transition had been completed in seven months, grinned about having sold half of new Macs to newcomers to the platform, and t...
AMD has coined a buzzword: megatasking. I'm still not positive what AMD means by it, but I'd use it to describe the work style of those on the verge of needing second desktops or workstations to accomplish their heavy mix of foreground applications a...
Microsoft has intentionally rendered unsafe all but one path to heterogeneity, that being the use of Novell's SLES (Suse Linux Enterprise Server) in networks with Windows. By immunizing Novell against future intellectual property actions, Microsoft t...
When I have to declare, as I do this week, that everything I write in my column and blogs is my personal opinion, you know I'm on the warpath.
It's a pity that discussions on the subject of security vulnerabilities associated with virtual servers tend to focus on Windows: If a virtual machine is running as a guest on a Windows host, an exploit on the guest VM can climb up to the Windows hos...
Virtualization is designed to render differences between systems irrelevant, but this is a good-news/bad-news arrangement. The good news is that IT can treat every server as an x86, with all x86 systems being standard. The bad news relates to the new...
The green computing movement has gotten some traction; I'm glad. That was one of my earliest campaigns, a cause I fought before I had a voice. And until a few years ago, I was frustrated that others were overlooking the obvious: Corporations don't ne...
Apple gave up on Xserve G5, its 1U rack server, more than a year ago, and with it, its drive to gain share in the enterprise server market. Apple doesn't talk about what doesn't work or why, but I speculate that Apple's enterprise program took so lon...
Intel's legal staff might as well buy homes in Delaware. That's the venue for AMD's anti-trust action against Intel, and this month, Transmeta petitioned the same Delaware Federal District Court to find that Intel has violated 10 of Transmeta's paten...
If you were counting on Leopard gaining an advantage from shipping before Vista, it looks like you're out of luck. Vista is in its last test release before shipment, and historically, the final release candidate becomes the supported RTM (ready to ma...
The outlandish requirements of gaming and media applications have not only changed the way PCs are configured, it has also driven an expansion of the x86 instruction set and on-chip registers that practically creates a CPU within a CPU (or a core wit...
The phrase "kid in a candy store" conjures up a dazzling dreamscape of treats and an immediate longing for everything that the kid sees.
Let me ask you: If your wildest dreams were realized, how many cores per CPU would you have in your servers, workstations and power desktops right now? How much Level 2 cache memory would you have in each core, or would you rather it be shared amongs...
Apple's US$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.
