Jeff Partridge

I shamelessly stole this item right off the page of eWeek’s newsletter.
News Analysis: Security: The Consumer Device Conundrum
With workers carrying a growing array of consumer devices capable of storing large amounts of data, enterprises are being forced to rethink their IT policies to protect themselves from vulnerabilities. What are some possible solutions?

Microsoft has released a beta of a tool that has wide-ranging usefulness for those of us tasked with preserving some teensy bit of security on customers’ family PCs. This new tool (OS validation required to use it) will allow creation of and micro-management of user security profiles.

Microsoft has released something that a lot of developers have been waiting for: the Longhorn SDK. Included are the first widely published tools for building Longhorn applications. Beta 1 of the desktop version of Longhorn is still due ‘this summer,’ but the new OS won’t mean much if there’s no software to run on it. [...]

Yes, the license that everyone simultaneously lives by and seems to disagree with is going to be revised. Sooner than later, or so it seems by the article. We’ll have to wait to see if it’s good or bad.
NEW YORK - Seeking to relieve patent licensing worries by the open-source community, industry heavyweights here at [...]

IBM to Lay Off 13,000 Worldwide
It’s still sad to see a company that jump-started an entire industry get so bad that it has to resort to layoffs. They were one of the old-school companies that provided ‘cradle-to-grave’ care for their people and never had a layoff of any kind.

True to my expectations, Microsoft has confirmed shipment of this quarter’s Action Pack today. I figured it’d wait until x64 launched, and it did. So I’m anxiously waiting for the package to arrive with a squeaky clean copy of x64 inside.
Still no details about the when and how for the XP Pro-to-x64 program, but I [...]

Mark Cox of eChannelLine writes:
Ingram Micro will shed 550 jobs in North America, as part of an outsourcing plan announced Monday designed to significantly improve operating efficiencies and realign and consolidate specific business operations. The job functions that will be affected are transaction-oriented service and support functions, including some in finance and shared services, customer [...]

Shh! I stole this from Steve Bass’s newsletter…
If you really want one of those new 2 GB Gmail accounts, an outfit called iSnoop.com is giving them away. LOTS of them. Here’s the site totals as I just saw them: Currently, we have 738,876 invites available to share. Thanks to the generosity of folks like you, we’ve [...]

It’s not exactly a crowded market, expecially when it comes to the small and medium business segment. So, we’ll consider Hitachi’s move to be welcome and a good idea, for them. Let’s hope that they do well. It might encourage a few more entries and some needed competition. The entire NAS market hasn’t yet seen [...]

This might seem like a one-line news item. I assure you that it involves a side of computing that few of the public even know about - manufacturer’s marketing programs for independent system builders.
This is a story that purports to tell both sides of this situation as it applies to Dell’s ‘White Box’ program. [...]

Martin LaMonica of CNET News.com writes:
Facing protests from legions of Visual Basic developers, Microsoft is not backing down. But it is taking steps to keep them on friendly terms.
Microsoft remains “firm” in its plans to end free support for Visual Basic 6 at the end of the month, S. “Soma” Somasegar, the corporate vice president [...]

My answer to you, Pete, would be the same one I’d give anyone else: What do you want to do with your system?
Once you have that figured out, the next step is to decide what software you want to use to accomplish that job (even if the ‘job’ happens to be playing a game)! Spend [...]

Announcing MBSA 2.0 Beta: Please help us improve the quality of the next version of the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer. We are currently accepting nominations into the MBSA 2.0 beta program. Customers can nominate themselves for the beta. They will need to log on to the system using their Microsoft .NET Passport and a guest [...]

I just had a very interesting conversation with a Microsoft representative about OEM licensing. This may be preaching to the choir, but it made me decide to be a lot more careful when I sell a system that I put Windows in.
The thing that concerns me most is that I found out that there [...]

This is just a quick report. It doesn’t need more. You may have seen one of my previous reports on the free online classes run by HP. Now it’s expanded that university from classes for consumers and small businesspeople into entire “campuses” for different kinds of people. The one I’ll mention today is for IT [...]

Quoted from the Dec/Jan issue of HP World magazine:
Impatient with delays in moving Compaq Unix technology over to HP’s variant, HP shelved plans to bring Tru64’s TruCluster and Advanced File System to HP-UX 11i V3, and said it will instead integrate technology from storage company Veritas.

Steve Wozniak’s Wheels of Zeus is beginning to roll, and enterprise data protection is one destination on the Apple Computer Inc. co-founder’s mind.
Wozniak offered a peek into his vision for the company on Ziff Davis Media’s Security Virtual Tradeshow, where he introduced “wOz Location-Based Encryption,” an application that uses GPS tracking within a wireless hub [...]

Acronis True Image Enterprise Server, Acronis True Image
Corporate Workstation, provide instant bare-metal recovery and back-up for corporate and enterprise servers and workstations.
SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF., November 17, 2004 - Acronis, Inc., the technological leader in systems and storage management solutions, launched Acronis True Image Enterprise Server 8.0 and Acronis True Image Corporate Workstation 8.0. [...]

Competitors criticize Dell for a lack of engineering expertise, but the company said one significant computer due to launch in November is its own design: its second-generation blade server, the PowerEdge 1855.
The PowerEdge 1855–and a successor, the 1955, due in February–is expected to use a chassis 12.25 inches tall that can accommodate 10 dual-processor [...]

“Today, Chuck writes: Matt, I’ve been having problems with my computer slowing down a lot over the past few weeks.”
I know you’ve ALL gotten questions just like this in your careers. And I know, just as surely, that it makes you cringe every time you hear it.