While Baby Bells sit on their assets...
Let's ask David Berlind's question again. "Are Baby Bells abusing their government granted right-of-way?
Between the Lines
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
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.
Andrew Nusca
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
Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.
Latest Posts
Sun continues sailing its free and open course with DRM
Sun has lately been crowing lately about how it was the original open source company, and despite not jumping on or responding to the Linux open source movement until the last few years (OpenSolaris is a 2005 phenomenon), the company is now trying to claim its more open than thou status and touting community development.
Two tech pioneers: Dave and Ray
Dave Winer's OPML Roadshow in Berkeley was attended by more than the local geeks. Ray Ozzie, as well as Robert Scoble, represented Microsoft among the audience.
Winer's OPML Roadshow rolls into Berkeley
My old friend Dave Winer is taking a new tact in evangelizing his latest invention--driving cross country on a barnstorming tour. The fourth stop of his OPML Roadshow was in Berkeley, CA last night, and a crowd of about 50 people listened as Dave demonstrated his OPML Editor.
Steve Jobs sighting, monoculture and software ecosystems
While attending the Blog Business Summit this afternoon, I ran into chief Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble (right), who told me (along with IE7 product manager Dean Hachamovitch and SOAP and RSS pioneer Dave Winer) his tale of running into Steve Jobs at lunch. Star struck, Scoble introduced himself and the others, and true to form Jobs said, "It's nice to see that you're copying our stuff.
New vendors-a-bloggin'
Just a heads up that two more vendors have officially launched multi-employee-written blogs for their customers, fans, followers, and partners. Adobe is funnelling all new blog entries from eight of its staffers to the top level URL blogs.
On technology for the elderly
Toshiba has two teams working on "home life support robots" designed to aid Japan's aging population. (Japan's population growth is near zero and its citizens' average age is climbing rapidly.
One man's corporate standard--another man's monoculture?
If you caught one of my recent blogs about zero-day exploits, a day in the life of a real IT manager, and how he's very worried about what he's seeing (in terms of what's getting through the cracks), then you also saw that Doc Searls is recommending that companies consider the idea of polycultures. There's no question that monoculture-based IT deployments increase the odds that a simple exploit can devastate an entire company, let alone the Internet.
Uh oh. Has the zero-day exploit tipping point finally arrived?
By way of linkage from Doc Searls comes this tale of woe from Mike, an IT guy in the trenches who, up until now, felt as though he was doing a pretty good job beating back the bad guys from the networks and users that he supports. Says Mike of the Windows installation he oversees: So, here it is in Mid-2005, we've got a continous stream of system patches, and a continous stream of virus definitions, most of our spam is gone, and we're behind a continously updated firewall.
More standardization work on enterprise information flow
Worth noting: The Open Group (you remember them) this week spurred on work to add additional (and needed) standardization to the interoperability of different but semantically equivalent data. The San Francisco-based vendor-neutral organization is working to create a registry that holds descriptions and identifiers of the venerable Universal Data Element Framework (UDEF).