Utilities

News

• PlanetLab creates a more advanced sudo

  Researchers at the PlanetLab global research network have developed a potential replacement for the widely used Unix sudo tool, called Vsys, that will offer administrators far greater control over what end users can and can't access.

• MapReduce could be the server's newest friend

  In the future, when an administrator does a server build, he or she may be adding a MapReduce library to the usual stack of server, database and middleware software.

• Building a more resourceful cloud

  While managers may anticipate how cloud computing will one day ease IT headaches, the purveyors of cloud services themselves still need to further fine-tune the way their cloud services are metered and managed in order to make truly flexible cloud co...

• Precise virtualizes application monitoring

  In an effort to reduce deployment time, software provider Precise Software has packaged its flagship application performance management (APM) application in a virtual machine, making the product the first APM virtual appliance, the company said.

• Aternity app monitor now covers Web 2.0 apps

  Aternity has updated its application monitoring platform so that it can monitor Ajax-styled Web applications as well as 64-bit Java desktop applications, the company announced Tuesday.

• Windows debugging made easy

  When it comes to debugging hard-to-diagnose software and operating-system problems, there is no set recipe. Rather debugging is all about "having the right tools and knowing how to use them," advised Microsoft technical fellow Mark Russinovich at the...

• Attachmate has high hopes for Novell products

  Attachmate intends to revitalize the sales and technical development of the end-user computing products that it acquired when it purchased Novell, such as those for virtualization and enterprise collaboration.

• Webmasters face new site optimization challenges

  From the Web's early days, companies have struggled to make their sites faster, but the problem remains a thorny one, with new challenges emerging regularly as technology advances.

• How to keep local access to data during Cloud outages

  The Amazon cloud services outage that knocked out several popular Websites last week raised questions about the reliability of the cloud, but the general consensus is that it works if you plan for failure. Like any good business plan, a good cloud pl...

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  What your business can learn from Amazon Cloud outage

  The servers are back up and users can once again check in on Foursquare and ask questions on Quora, but the legacy of last week's Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) outage will live on and provide important lessons for businesses as they look to cl...

• Able utility O&O DiskRecovery finds, restores lost data

  Recovering data is no small deal -- as anyone who's lost some will attest. But with so many programs out there, it's had to choose. The latest version 7 of O&O's DiskRecovery ($100. feature-limited demo) is making a strong argument to be your first c...

• Leaving your job? Take your data with you

  Nothing lasts forever, and in the 21st century, most people's employment is anything but guaranteed. What should have some permanence, however, is our digital footprint -- the body of data that constitutes the true center of our professional lives. I...

• Backup disasters: How you can avoid them

  As poet Robert Burns famously put it, the best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft a-gley, that is, they often go awry. Im thinking of those lines as I struggle to clean up a backup and subsequent hard drive replacement that went seriously wrong.

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  TestDisk, PhotoRec fix disks, recover files

  If you're a fan of character-based interfaces -- such as DOS -- and free data recovery, you're going to love TestDisk and its companion utility, PhotoRec (a brother program included in the TestDisk download). Both free programs run in a DOS box or fr...

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  10 Must-Have Free Downloads

  Some downloadable software is so good that you just have to grab it. Unfortunately, often you have to pay for it after you try it out. But every once in a while, a must-have program is totally free. Such indispensable, no-cost programs are the hardes...