infoworld

Frauds: An ugly, old journalism tradition

It's handwringing time in the journalism world again.

Over the weekend, IDG, publisher of InfoWorld, acknowledged that Randall Kennedy, one of InfoWorld's contributing writers, had misled some at the company about his involvement with Devil Mountain Software, a firm he wrote about and just happens to own.

While Kennedy told his InfoWorld editors about his interest in Devil Mountain, he did not tell them that he had created a fictitious chief technology officer for his company, a man named Craig Barth. Masquerading as Barth, Kennedy was able to mislead Gregg Keizer, a staff writer for sister IDG publication Computerworld, … Read more

InfoWorld's two minds on open source's value

Each year InfoWorld sets out to rate the "best open source products" with its Bossie awards. Too bad it has decided to cloud the voting with open-source politics, as well.

The politics reveal themselves when InfoWorld tries to settle on a winner between Zenoss and OpenNMS. (Why Hyperic isn't also in that mix, or Reductive Labs' Puppet, I can't fathom, but...)

The editors write (note: the emphasis is mine):

Although Zenoss clearly has the more developed feature set, our Bossie goes to OpenNMS. The reason boils down to business models. OpenNMS is a purely open source … Read more

The new face of open source

To get a glimpse of the changing face of open source, look no further than InfoWorld's "Future of Open Source" roundtable. Some of the thoughts expressed by various leaders in the open-source community are insightful, but that's not the real story.

No, the real story is who InfoWorld chose to profile.

Sure, you get the obligatory Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond call-outs, because these are two of the guys that formed the foundation of open source upon which the rest of us build. But they're the only throwbacks to the "good ol' days" … Read more

Top five IT spending priorities for the recession

InfoWorld consulted a range analysts and CIOs to figure out the five technologies IT shops must continue to invest in despite the recession. The common theme, says IDC chief analyst and senior vice president Frank Gens, is that "any technologies that can save companies money or reduce expenses will continue to thrive."

1. Storage: Disks and management software 2. Business intelligence: Niche analytics 3. Virtualization: Optimizing resources 4. Security: Data and end points 5. Cloud computing: Business solutions

These are all very logical, but I fail to see why the Cloud factors so heavily (say in contrast to … Read more

InfoWorld says Windows 7's not that fast

While many of those who have played around with the early version of Windows 7 have noted that it feels pretty zippy, especially for a pre-beta version, InfoWorld says early benchmarks show the software is just on par with its predecessor.

In an article on Monday, InfoWorld said that Windows 7 is a "virtual twin" of Vista when it comes to performance.

On the one hand, this could be seen as bad news, considering Microsoft's efforts to position Windows 7 as better performing. At the same time, this is a pre-beta version. Early releases often lag in … Read more

Virtual stack vendor CohesiveFT part of Top Ten Tech Startups

CohesiveFT is one of the more interesting vendors that you probably haven't heard much about yet. Their "Elastic Servers" are custom application stacks as virtual images.

Basically, they have created a "software chassis" for VM images to rolled on-demand. The company maintains libraries of components and customers may add their own proprietary components to the library (for their use only) and construct the image of a virtual application stack. The resulting images are built, encapsulated, given a unique identity and injected with management and integration services.

For example you can quickly create a VM image of Mule … Read more