Ahead of the Curve | Tom YagerForward-looking insight informing today's technology choicesThe view from Microsoft's Live Mesh and Apple's .Mac: Shared disks and remote desktop access, no VPN required- April 30, 2008 Apple's .Mac comes close to offering professionals secure shared data and remote desktop access without the hassle of VPN. Microsoft Live Mesh hopes to take it all the way. Old-schoolers will tell you that there are only two places your important data should live: on your meticulously secured network behind a paranoid firewall, or at Iron Mountain. One must heed the old schoolers, for they shall keep the bitemarks off your backside, but their advice must be tempered with modern reality. Having..http://weblog.infoworld.com/yager/archives/2008/04/ahead_of_the_cu_1.html?source=rss For server power measurement, there's only one shortcut- April 22, 2008 On this Earth Day, let us examine the criteria that IT brings to its purchases and arrange to make power efficiency a top priority. All it takes is the will, a little homework, and the embrace of the delusion that there's any fit and fair way to compare the power consumption of two similar pieces of equipment. Discover the techniques used by InfoWorld's 2008 Green 15 winners to make their IT more energy-efficient. Last December 27, SPEC announced the availability of its SPECpower benchmark....http://weblog.infoworld.com/yager/archives/2008/04/for_server_powe.html?source=rss Back to the Mac- April 16, 2008 Several months ago, I determined that my years-long fondness required reexamination. I quietly took a break from the Mac to get some perspective, to check out Vista, AMD, and Longhorn (Windows Server 2008) untainted by Apple's PR and uninfluenced by other journalists and bloggers. I elected to take a break from reviews of new Mac hardware, the occasion of which always piques my interest in Apple's platform. There were times when I felt I'd chosen the worst possible time for this hiatus. I ended.http://weblog.infoworld.com/yager/archives/2008/04/back_to_the_mac.html?source=rss Corrections to "Back to the Mac"- April 16, 2008 I made a couple of statements in my recent "Ahead of the Curve" blog that Apple contacted me to correct. First, contrary to my claim that the iPhone SDK is the first time that Apple has released a public preview editions of Xcode in the past, Apple claims to have done so. Apple tells me that it is not incorporating FORTRAN into beta 3 of its iPhone SDK, a release that includes the newest stable build of the GNU Compiler Collection toolchain. MacOSForge lists FORTRAN as a default language in its.http://weblog.infoworld.com/yager/archives/2008/04/corrections_to.html?source=rss The return of Made in America- April 10, 2008 If you feed an educated, socially connected populace a steady diet of war, dirty politics, greedy CEOs, job losses, zero wage growth, ecological mayhem, $3 per gallon gasoline, homeless homeowners, and whining predatory investors, you get about what you'd expect: Some really demoralized, anxious, fed up people. A friend put it this way: "it's not fun being an American any more." We're not sitting around moaning about it. Americans have their sleeves rolled up. I speak for a lot of you, I think,.http://weblog.infoworld.com/yager/archives/2008/04/ahead_of_the_cu.html?source=rss AIR gets rich apps right- April 2, 2008 Adobe's AIR is safe, fast, versatile, and open, and it will be the standard platform for rich Internet applications The modern browser makes an appealing client for Web-based applications, but even browsers like Safari 3.1 that incorporate features of HTML 5 and CSS 3 have limitations that keep them from competing with native .Net and Java desktop applications. In those areas where a browser falls short, such as video and audio playback and local file access, the developer must resort to a...http://weblog.infoworld.com/yager/archives/2008/04/air_gets_rich_a.html?source=rss |