Larry Dignan and other IT industry experts, blogging at the intersection of business and technology, deliver daily news and analysis on vital enterprise trends.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.
Andrew Nusca is a writer-editor for ZDNet, contributor to CNET and the editor of SmartPlanet, ZDNet's sister site about innovation. In 2013, his coverage will focus on enterprise startups. He is based in New York.
Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.
Doc Searls has authored his longest and perhaps most significant online entry ever. See Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes.
Google Base, the service that has been on an off the 'Net in alpha mode for the last few weeks has gone beta and is live. Google Base has been described variously as an online database, competition for Craigs List, or Google's first crack at eBay.
Marten Mickos, CEO of open source database company MySQL AB, was motivated by the recent controversy over SAP executive Shai Agassi's remarks about open source to write the following perspective piece. In his view, some companies really support the notion of open source software, which he says will "define the next generation architecture for the modern enterprise," and others say nice things about it, but really don't support it.
As part of our ongoing CIO Sessions series to find out what's on the minds of CIOs, I interviewed Rick Davidson, senior vice president and CIO at Manpower, the $16 billion global staffing service. The podcast interview can be delivered directly to your desktop or MP3 player if you're subscribed to our podcasts (See ZDNet’s podcasts: How to tune in), or you can just download the MP3.
There is the old rule of thumb that says "never buy a car the first year it is introduced" and similarly, "don't buy an OS until after the first service pack ships," but waiting until 2008 to upgrade to an OS that ships in 2006 is ridiculous. (And the idea of waiting for the first service pack to ship is probably pretty dumb too.
Good news for military (or financial) controllers who sit at a desk with a half-dozen PCs when one secure one would do.
As part of our ongoing CIO Sessions series to find out what's on the minds of CIOs, I interviewed Bruce Carver, CIO of Dana Corp., a $9 billion auto parts manufacturer.
Since this seems to be DRM Day at Between the Lines, allow me to present a short, personal story that highlights, at least for me, the evils of DRM and the DCMA. Last week, I prepared a story for this blog illustrating how to put shows from a TiVo onto one of the new video iPods.
Earlier today, I wrote a blog entry entitled The day the broadcast died. It talks about how the RSS subscription protocol has been married to TV programming in a way that could completely disintermediate the current channels of TV program distribution.
Today is the day that TV and radio broadcasters around the world (and digital video recorder makers like TiVo) dreaded would come. It's the day that someone married the RSS subscription protocol to Bittorrent in a way that turns the Internet into one big giant and free TiVo machine.