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.
Through Technorati, I was led to a quickly sprouting tree of threads regarding my recent commentary on Sun's 1,600 patent deal, and then my colleague Dana Blankenhorn's follow-up to that. First, I think I was able to follow all of the various branches to their ends and want to say that I appreciate some of the compliments.
An article at TechTree reportsthat according to IDC's Worldwide Handheld QView, shipments ofhandheld devices fell nearly 20 percent year-over-year in thefourth quarter of 2004 to 2.8 million units.
After seeing Arthur "the Fonz" Fonzarelli jump over a threatening shark while water skiing in an episode of the classic television series Happy Days, Jon Hein knew that there was no better metaphor than "jumping the shark" to describe that absurd moment in a TV series' history when its producers officially put the show on life support. After reading today's news -- It's Windows vs.
Triggered by Sun's granting of access to 1600 patents -- but only if the resulting implementations are licensed under the recently Sun-authored, Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved Community Development and Distribution License (CDDL, pronounced "cuddle") -- the squeakiest of the anti-patent wheels are letting their disappointment be known.
Interview: Microsoft's departing CFO John Connors recently talked with McKinsey about the thinking behind the company's cash payment to shareholders, its new approach to financial transparency, and its embrace of Sarbanes-Oxley.
Today, one of my students presented a paper in my graduate middleware class entitled Defense Enabling Using Advanced Middleware: An Example (PDF). The paper talks about various strategies for defending applications (rather than systems) from attack.
Employers who allow Internet access in the office now have the option of charging employees for personal bandwidth thanks to a new system developed by Exinda Networks. According to an article, the billing system allows a company to monitor exactly which Web sites are visited by each employee and how much bandwidth has been used.
In November, Sun announced--but didn't actually begin selling-- pay-as-you-go computing. Today, Sun is ramping up capacity and adding a high-end storage service costing $1 per gigabyte per month.
In issue #8 of ZDNet's IT Matters series of podcasts (download the MP3, or learn how to have them automatically downloaded while you're sleeping), Sun president and COO Jonathan Schwartz lays out his vision for utility computing, why Sun's $1-per-CPU-per-hour pricing has no choice but to trend down towards (maybe to 50 cents next year), why services built on utility grids will trend to be free, and why Google, Yahoo and eBay are examples of how we're actually already there.
Somewhere within Sun, the executives are saying "Whattayagotta do to get some respect around here? We give and give and give and they still want more.