With the release of Windows Server 2003, Microsoft reached an important milestone. Both its desktop and server operating systems are now, by any reasonable measure, finished. With the demise of Windows Me, the company met its goal of extending the NT architecture to all x86 systems. Windows has become the unified platform it was always meant to be.
After years of hype, the Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Opteron 64-bit processor is scheduled to debut this month. The company and its shareholders might curse the rotten timing, but the current contracted market is actually the perfect setting for AMD’s new technology. While other chipmakers scramble to adapt, AMD seems to have designed current business challenges and priorities into its architecture. Considering how long Opteron has been in engineering, AMD is either very smart or very lucky. Opteron may be an opportune solution for customers looking to consolidate their servers and reduce operating costs.
In Asia and Europe, colour displays and rich messaging are considered baseline requirements for mobile phones. But in the US, most mobile phones are just smaller, lighter remakes of the original, bulky car phone. Most US users expect their mobile phones to do only one thing: make and receive voice calls.
Tom Yager’s hunch is that the market is sophisticated enough to accept the substantial performance hit associated with tablet PCs in return for battery life.
As the United States enters the post-bubble, late-recession, prewar (as I write this) economy, one of IT’s biggest money machines, Sun Microsystems, is lobbying to sell you something. Anything.
Take inventory now of the technologies, suppliers, and partners you can’t live without.
Open technology has altered the business models of Microsoft, Apple, IBM, and Sun and is putting a fresh spin on IT’s approach to technology selection and integration in 2003. IDG’s Tom Yager looks at how Office 11, Mac OS X and open source are fuelling an industry movement away from proprietary wares
There are trend-conscious people at every company who demand the sharpest-looking mobile phone or PDA, something that screams “I’m so hip”. Whether or not it actually works is irrelevant. With IT budgets squeezed almost to zero, management is understandably touchy about frivolous purchase requests.
As executive vice president of Sun's software group, Jonathan Schwartz heads the company's new unified software business and is leading the charge to promote the Linux open-source technology. He sat down with Steve Gillmor and Tom Yager to discuss Sun's recently announced Linux desktop strategy and to explain how it's in the industry's best interests to develop an alternative to arch-rival Microsoft.
Any planning document coming out of IT these days is bound to make heavy use of the term "consolidate". Applied to storage, consolidation means maximising the capacity of your most capable arrays, servers, and networked storage devices. If you're relying on 36GB and 18GB drives now, you can expand your capacity by a factor of four or eight without consuming more rack space or raising power and cooling costs.
More often than not, the term "no-brainer" doesn't describe a decision as much as it does the person who made it. IT is subjected to an endless parade of supposed no-brainers, from single-vendor solutions to open-source software; the latest no-brainer involves unbranded PCs, also known as white boxes.
Paper is silent and supremely portable. When you use a pen to fill out a form, you're using one of the densest, most efficient input tools available. Remarkably, computers have yet to match these benefits.
Through the years, Microsoft has constantly upgraded the features of VB (Visual Basic) to keep them in sync with Windows' capabilities. Yet even as VB took on new features, Windows business software got easier to write with each new release of the IDE (integrated development environment).
When putting together a large commercial site, the cut-throat business climate doesn't allow much time for experimentation and invention.
The new Macromedia MX product line, slated to ship this month or next, is centred around the Studio MX development suite and emphasises the combined use of the Flash Player 6 client and the ColdFusion MX server.
